Accounting Giant Ernst & Young Rolls Out New Contract Manager on Ethereum To Execute Business Agreements

Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) has launched an Ethereum (ETH)-based solution to automate contract management and prevent non-compliant transactions and errors.

In a statement, the firm says the EY OpsChain Contract Manager (OCM) runs on the Ethereum public blockchain to facilitate the execution of complex and multi-party business agreements. 

The contract manager supports most business contract types, including volume purchase agreements, standardized rate cards, volume discounts, rebates and price models that are dependent on market data feeds.

“EY OCM helps address the enterprise challenge of managing business agreements that run across internal and external operational and technology siloes.

EY OCM synchronizes data across business partners and uniformly enforces key business terms such as standardized pricing, volume discounts, rebates and strike prices.”

Ernst & Young says EY OCM uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to ensure that critical information, such as contract terms and transaction details, remains confidential. ZKPs are protocols that verify the validity of transactions without disclosing the underlying information.

Says Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, 

“We’ve identified from past client work that contract automation can improve accuracy while cutting cycle times by more than 90%, and overall contract administration costs by nearly 40%.

With our zero-knowledge privacy technology, we have industrialized this capability, and we can now get these benefits at a fraction of the up-front cost.”

The firm launched the contract manager during the 2024 EY Global Blockchain Summit in London last week.