Case Study

Innovation in action: how Conveyor transformed Carta's customer trust program

“Conveyor has been a game-changer for Carta.

We love how Conveyor continually innovates and evolves its product capabilities, enabling us to stay ahead of customer demands while also providing efficiency and accuracy at scale.

Conveyor has had a transformative impact on our business operations and how we build trust with our customers.”
Nathan Ricketts
Information Security
ABOUT CARTA
Carta is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. Their vision is to change how companies, investors, law firms, and employees manage equity. Over 35,000 companies use Carta to fundraise, issue equity, and stay compliant, and with an increasing global presence, Carta has become one of the leading equity management platforms in the world.

Business Challenge

Building customer trust around data security is a top priority for Carta, which means security reviews are incredibly important to closing deals. While onboarding tens of thousands of customers and experiencing explosive growth, the Carta team knew their security review process needed to be redesigned to be able to scale in line with the company’s growth. 

The challenges were numerous: Carta was using a manual process to track tickets and get customers security documentation, it was a challenge to triage requests, the NDA workflow was tedious, and they were scheduling multiple one-off meetings with prospects during the process. 

In some cases these meetings would involve three to four Carta team members - which meant 8-10 hours of combined time spent. Nathan (Nate) Ricketts, part of the Information Security team, noted that, “In many prospect meetings, there were recurring questions that had already been addressed with previous customers, so we wanted a more efficient and timely way to get customers what they needed.” 

With an information security team that interfaced with several support teams and hundreds of sales people, Carta needed a solution that was easy to implement and onboard internally that would serve as their single source of truth.

When searching for a solution, Carta’s main goals were:

  • Providing customers a pleasant, seamless experience
  • Reducing the number of security questionnaires and time spent on questionnaires needed to maintain Carta’s high level of security integrity
  • Creating a single source of truth for security collateral for internal efficiencies

Seamless customer experience

Reduce number of security questionnaires and time spent on them

Creating single source of truth for security collateral

Early significant results  

Integrating Conveyor into Carta’s support and sales teams was relatively easy and smooth due to continued Conveyor onboarding support, training, and enablement materials.

Nate noticed immediate results after implementing Conveyor: "From the get go we saw a remarkable decrease in the number of questionnaires in our queue as many customers started engaging with Carta's trust portal and finding the security information they needed on their own."

This success was attributed to the effectiveness of Conveyor's customer-facing trust portal as a source of truth for all teams to point customers to. Conveyor eliminated the ticketing processes and triaging of requests. For Nate's team, they valued having a reliable source of information that encouraged customers to self-serve and find answers to their questions.

Using the trust portal, Carta was able to support thousands of security reviews in 2022 and spent ~80% less time on this part of the process. 

Features that were impactful

There were several aspects of the product that were particularly impactful to the Carta security compliance team and have become a critical part of their new workflows:

Trust portal for document sharing
Impact: Using the trust portal, Carta was able to support thousands of security reviews in 2022 and spent 83% less time on this part of the process. 

"We want our customers to feel empowered to have unencumbered access to information about Carta and how we protect their data. By leveraging Conveyor, we are able to provide our customers with a secure and simple self-service model so they can access the information they need on-demand," says Nate.

Click-wrap NDA automation
Conveyor streamlined the NDA process for Carta. Between redlines, status tracking, execution of documents, the process could take multiple days before using Conveyor. 

Impact:
With Conveyor, getting an NDA signed is now instant and seamless. “And it’s now a painless process for us,” says Nate.

Seamless, automated customer experience
The security team was better able to communicate their security posture to customers in a professional manner that also enhanced the sales process itself.

Impact: Thanks to Conveyor, Carta’s prospects now can request access independently, get approved within a few hours, and easily find everything they need in one place at any time of the day - including downloading documents and searching a customer-facing knowledge base of popular questions and answers. “This embodies the pleasant customer experience we strive to deliver at every interaction,” notes Nate.

Saving countless hours on the remaining questionnaires

Carta has been involved in early tests of a new Conveyor feature, the GPT-powered Questionnaire Automation Software which provides Nate with a solution to easily complete outstanding questionnaires from customers who need more than what’s in Carta's self-service portal. Additionally, the collaboration features help Nate and the Infosec team smoothly manage the questionnaire completion process with several other teams in a consolidated workflow, which can be challenging ensuring that everyone has the most updated information and the status updates of which questionnaires are in-flight. 

“One of the key benefits lies in effectively keeping numerous stakeholders informed and engaged, striking the perfect balance.” says Nate, “and Conveyor helps us do just that.”

Speeding up the process by 2x

Conveyor’s security questionnaire automation software leverages the power of OpenAI's GPT-4 technology to take a first pass at auto-generating responses to entire questionnaires, drawing exclusively from Carta's information to generate the responses.

When Nate’s team uploads a questionnaire to Conveyor, Conveyor searches Carta’s knowledge base to retrieve the most relevant content.

By automatically filling in a first draft of answers, it significantly accelerates the security questionnaire process for Carta, delivering results at least twice as fast and cutting down on review time with 90%+ accurate answers.

“Before we had this security questionnaire automation software,” says Nate, “It was challenging to keep an updated source of truth. Every questionnaire asks the same question in a slightly different way and we had to keep multiple question and answer pairs on the same topics which made the knowledge base unruly and difficult to manage. Conveyor's tool now identifies the nuance and context of a question regardless of its wording, providing a precise answer 90%+ of the time. This will empower our sales team to kick off the questionnaire workflow and take a first pass which will minimize the impact to our legal and compliance teams.”

Working together to get the questionnaire over the line is a breeze in Conveyor, with collaboration features directly in the workflow - citations, notifications, “ask a subject matter expert”, commenting, and history.  

The result?

“Conveyor's GPT-questionnaire automation software is a welcome addition to our workflow. It’s like we have this little helper that takes some of the more repetitive tasks off of our plate so we can spend time where it matters – on review and making sure our customers are getting the accurate responses they need in a timely manner,” says Nate.

He adds, “I’m impressed with how quickly Conveyor adopted this technology. It shows their dedication to solving this problem in an innovative way.”

"Conveyor's tool now identifies the nuance and context of a question regardless of its wording, providing a precise answer 90%+ of the time. This will empower our sales team to kick off the questionnaire workflow and take a first pass which will minimize the impact to our legal and compliance teams.”

What would a world without Conveyor look like for Carta?

“Conveyor has been a game-changer for us,” says Nate. “You can’t avoid security questionnaires, but with an innovative platform and partner like Conveyor, we can adeptly respond to customers’ unique requests in a structured and systematic manner. The speed of evolution with every new release is astonishing and we truly appreciate the unique perspective that Conveyor brings to the table in how they have gone about designing and implementing solutions for companies like ours.” 

He continues, “We continue to partner with Conveyor because they’re looking at this problem from a different lens. Everyone has a band-aid solution while Conveyor is solving it in a realistic way with leading edge technology.

"Conveyor's questionnaire automation software is a welcome addition to our workflow. I’m impressed with how quickly Conveyor adopted this technology. It shows their dedication to solving this problem in an innovative way.”

Nathan Ricketts
Information Security
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