AI CLM Increases BNY Mellon’s Visibility Into Over 78,000 Contracts
BNY Mellon is the oldest bank in America. Today, it powers the financial industry with insights from one of the largest datasets in the world.
Company Overview
Established in 1784, Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) is America’s oldest bank and the first company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The bank works with some of the world’s most influential suppliers in 100+ markets. It has 53,200 employees across 35 countries and manages trillions of dollars in assets – which means hundreds of thousands of high-value contracts.
“We just lacked visibility into our contracting progress and process as a whole. Everything was manually done via e-mail; we logged into a SharePoint to engage with our legal partners.”
Challenge
Before Sirion, BNY Mellon’s contracting operations were largely disparate and lived in multiple IT systems across the enterprise – Legal scrambled from one system to another to locate contract information. The company also followed an archaic method of generating contracts on Sharepoint and reviewing them over emails.
While Legal struggled with manual processes and version control, this system also made visibility into contract information outside the legal team (e.g., procurement) difficult. Other teams depended heavily on Legal to draft and approve contracts, resulting in process bottlenecks.
Additionally, BNY Mellon lacked:
- proper contract audit trails and obligation monitoring
- authoring and approval workflows
- validation checks for suppliers
- standardized clause libraries
This proved especially risky in the bank’s efforts to ensure adherence to GSCM policy.
Solution
Sirion stepped in as BNY Mellon’s CLM partner and quickly went to work helping the bank move their existing contract database of over 78,000 contracts into a centralized repository and digitize the entire authoring process – contract draft creation, reviews, negotiations, and approval.
Sirion’s contract AI did this by:
- Auto-extracting preferred templates, clauses, and 100+ metadata fields from the bank’s existing contracts.
- Setting custom, automated contract workflows for different contract types and approval cycles with embedded validation checks, ensuring compliance with GSCM policies.
- Pulling contract information from across the bank’s diverse IT systems, including the risk assessment tool (used by the legal team to conduct due diligence) and the procurement platform.
- Providing a dashboard (visible across the organization) for tracking service levels and obligations to monitor and manage contract performance.
“We've been standing up the repository leveraging the tool to help extract some of our metadata and clean up some legacy data. I would say that on our part, we had a bunch of contracts just thrown into a repository. And so, as we make that migration to Sirion, we get that visibility, we get a strong contract family association.”
Impact
By digitally transforming the contracting infrastructure, BNY Mellon:
- Improved time to contract – Minimizing unnecessary cross-team dependencies reduced contract turnaround time by 50%.
- Enhanced approval workflows – Contracts were automatically directed to Legal for review and approval without back and forth via email.
- Improved contract governance – Automated obligation management contributed to more robust third-party and supplier governance.
- Saved Legal time – Giving other teams visibility into existing contracts, templates, and clause libraries allowed any department within BNY Mellon to draft a contract.
- Enhance downstream efficiency – System integrations auto-triggered actions across other enterprise systems, like releasing a purchase order on the procurement platform once a contract is signed.
“It was a little bit of a learning curve, getting the templates on (the platform), but again, the initial run was heavily supported by Sirion.”
Additional Resources
Contract Repository Management: 7 Strategy Upgrade Tips
What is Contract Data Extraction? How to Automate it with AI?
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
