A hidden drag: Agreement bottlenecks are costing $600B in lost productivity in APAC

Business agreements are more complex than ever. This complexity can stem from sources beyond organisational control—think evolving macroeconomic environments, increasingly stringent compliance requirements, and competitive pressures. Yet it’s a complexity that must be managed, as agreements are fundamental to business success.

With complexity on the rise, it’s no wonder that over 75% of global business leaders now see agreement management as a C-level priority.

This finding comes from a new study by Deloitte and Docusign called Optimising Agreement Management, which builds on a similar study from 2024. Last year, we found that the Agreement Trap—that is, where outdated systems and processes trap valuable information inside static documents—was causing around US$2 trillion in lost economic value each year. In APAC alone, these losses were adding up to around US$600 billion. 

The losses were (and often still are) the result of manual agreement processes—especially at the contract creation and early approval stages. All this manual management leads to a hidden, yet massive drag on productivity. 

The good news? The new Deloitte/Docusign study finds that, on the whole, organisations are proactively setting out to recapture this trapped value. It also finds that the effort is paying off. Those that have invested in advanced agreement management capabilities like automation and AI are reporting a competitive advantage. 

Yet across the APAC region, there’s still work to be done. According to the study:

• Singapore trails Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) by over 25 percentage points in contract creation maturity. In this contract creation stage, 55% of ANZ leaders credit their digital capabilities as positioning them for success, nearly double that of their Singapore peers.

• In Japan, leaders are 24% less likely than their ANZ peers to meet productivity goals tied to agreement workflows.

• Leaders in ANZ and Japan are 21% more likely to report advanced analytics capabilities (like the ability to use AI to find business insights in existing contracts) than those in Singapore.

All these metrics point to a huge opportunity for businesses across APAC to improve their agreement management processes. Investing in advanced capabilities like automation, analytics and AI will deliver a raft of benefits—such as removing friction across the agreement lifecycle, providing proactive insights to drive more impactful decision-making, and simply increasing efficiency. It all adds up to greater business value.

To learn more about how the APAC region compares to the rest of the world when it comes to agreement management, read the full report, Optimising Agreement Management.