The situation
A UK clearing bank. Regulated, which means every new client relationship carries checks a normal quoting process never has to think about: onboarding, due diligence, risk and fraud. Those checks were real work done by real people, threaded through a ten-step chain that lived across spreadsheets, email and manual handoffs.
Quoting was the visible part. The compliance chain behind it was where the time actually went, and where the risk sat. The problem with that shape is not only speed. It is that nobody can see where a deal has got to, and nothing is reliably repeatable. In a regulated business, “we are fairly sure the checks were done” is not an answer anyone wants to give.
Why 120 days was the hard part
Not the configuration. The sequencing.
- The compliance steps could not be simplified away, only automated in place. Removing a due diligence step is not a process improvement, it is an audit finding. Every one of the ten had to survive the redesign and be evidenced afterwards.
- The sellers were not moving out of Salesforce. That was a fixed constraint, not a preference, which decided the architecture before the first workshop: CPQ on the Conga Advantage Platform with Salesforce as the front end.
- A single quarter leaves no room for a discovery phase that runs long. Scope had to be settled before build started, and it had to be right, because there was no slack to reopen it in week nine.
What we built
Conga CPQ on the Conga Advantage Platform, with the bank’s Salesforce org connected through the bridge package so sellers kept working where they already were. The heavy configuration and pricing logic runs on the platform; the seller experience did not change address.
The chain as logic, not a checklist
The ten steps were modelled as configuration, pricing and approval logic rather than as a document telling someone what to do next. What used to be a handoff became a state the system knows about.
Gated compliance steps
Onboarding, due diligence, risk and fraud became gates in the flow, each with an owner and an evidence trail, rather than parallel activity happening somewhere off to the side.
Approvals matched to real authority
Approval routing built against how the bank actually delegates authority, which is rarely what the policy document says. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a CPQ rollout stalls at adoption.
One visible path
A deal has a position now. That sounds modest until you have spent a morning trying to work out where one had got to.
How the timeline actually held
Three things did the work, and none of them are clever.
- Phase Zero was fixed at four weeks and treated as a gate, not a warm-up. It ended in a solution design, a risk register, a decision log and a not-to-exceed number for the build.
- The decision log is the part that saves the timeline. Every question answered once, in writing, with a date and an owner. A programme loses its quarter to questions being reopened, not to work being hard.
- Some things were deliberately left out of phase one. Agreeing what you are not doing is worth more than agreeing what you are, and it is the conversation most programmes avoid until it is expensive.
What happened after go-live
The engagement did not stop at production. Hypercare ran with a named person on standby rather than a support address, and from September 2026 the bank moved onto a managed service: reserved capacity booked monthly, unused hours carrying into the following quarter, and the same people who built it.
That continuity matters more on a regulated platform than on most. The team answering a question in month nine is the team that made the decision in month two, and the decision log is still there to explain why.
We reviewed the programme with Conga’s EMEA leadership at a quarterly business review. PinkSamurais is a Conga Certified Partner and delivered this programme end to end.
If you are looking at the same problem
Three things we would say to anyone weighing up a CPQ programme in a regulated environment.
- The compliance chain is the project. If a partner scopes the quoting and treats the checks as an integration detail, the estimate is wrong and you will find out late.
- Settle the edition question before you settle anything else. Whether CPQ runs inside Salesforce or on the Advantage Platform behind a Salesforce front end changes the shape of everything downstream. We set out how to decide that here.
- Fix scope at a paid gate. A free discovery call produces an estimate designed to win the work. A fixed-price Phase Zero produces a number someone is prepared to stand behind.
Explore the rest of the Conga practice
Is your quoting chain doing this to you?
A CPQ health check is short, fixed price, and ends in a document you own. It does not commit you to an implementation, and if the answer is that you do not need one, we will say so.