Founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784, BNY Mellon is one of the longest-lasting financial institutions in the world, and the bank currently has over $2 trillion in assets under management.

Until recently, however, BNY Mellon used an inefficient legacy process for managing contract reviews. For each new custodial agreement, the bank’s lawyers had to manually create a new contract.

After creating the first draft, the lawyers then had to navigate a complex web of escalations for approval. There was no centralized way to track revisions, which made it difficult to coordinate with the many stakeholders who had to sign off at each stage. Instead, documents traveled by email, with each reviewer making edits and sending the updated contract on to the next person. It was a little bit like a game of “hot potato.”

These manual processes and delays led to prolonged onboarding periods for clients and increased costs, in addition to potential gaps in version control and progress tracking.

BNY Mellon’s leadership was sure that there was a way to automate the process. 

That’s where Evisort came in.

Adopting best-in-class AI for contracts

Recognizing the need for a smart solution, the BNY Mellon team reached out to Evisort for help streamlining their contract generation, review, and management.

After meeting with the BNY Mellon legal team to understand their needs and protocols, Evisort helped them set up a tailored process to review new custodial agreements, based on their own internal rules and guidelines. BNY Mellon used Evisort to build custom workflows that matched their stakeholders’ needs, ensuring that every contract would go through the proper sequence of approvals before execution. Thanks to Evisort, the BNY Mellon team was able to eliminate the email “hot potato” game.

Evisort also made it easier to craft strong contracts. Instead of starting from scratch with each new deal, the BNY Mellon team used Evisort’s AI to identify the best clause examples across their existing agreements. They then created templates based on that ideal language, enabling them to start every contract negotiation with their best first draft.

Finding the information they need, when they need it, is now easier than ever for the BNY Mellon team. Evisort can search contracts for terms that are related to each other, but not identical. It recognizes dozens of standard provisions “out of the box,” and users can teach it business- or industry-specific terms over time. In addition, Evisort’s AI is powerful enough to track clauses retroactively, no matter how far back the organization’s contract portfolio extends. That search and tracking ability makes it easy for BNY Mellon’s lawyers to detect non-standard language and send it to the right personnel for review.

The results

Standardizing the contracting process in this way improved efficiency while reducing risk. With Evisort, the BNY Mellon team was able to create, tailor, update, and track contracts in a fraction of the time. By automating manual tasks, BNY Mellon was also able to streamline the customer onboarding process and effectively drive a better client experience.

As a result, Evisort’s end-to-end Contract Intelligence Platform reduced the time spent on rote work and freed up BNY Mellon’s attorneys to focus on more strategic projects.

In short: Evisort’s technology saved BNY Mellon time and money and gave stakeholders another level of assurance and security about their contracts.

Key takeaways

Time is money. AI is poised to transform the global financial ecosystem by giving teams more time to focus on high-impact work. McKinsey estimates that AI technologies, like Evisort, could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value for banks each year.

Here are four ways Evisort can support banks and other financial institutions:

Deliver better-integrated datasets

Evisort’s AI instantly turns all of an organization’s contracts, no matter where they are housed, into data — no file migration needed. It automatically tracks key information, dates, and clauses without manual data entry or review. The AI lets stakeholders sleep easier with customizable alerts for ongoing obligations, unsigned contracts, and upcoming renewal dates. Evisort also empowers lawyers and compliance professionals to monitor regulatory compliance and execute amendments or new contracts as regulations change.

Increase operational efficacy

Evisort’s AI allows teams to automate manual, repetitive tasks, enabling high-value employees to spend their time on more strategic work.

Enforce standard contracting processes and approvals

Evisort’s workflow builder and version control make it easy to govern what is signed, when, and by whom, with the protection of knowing that the correct contract terms are live.

Bolster regulatory compliance

Evisort enables financial institutions to navigate complex, changing regulatory guidelines with greater sophistication and efficiency by quickly locating and analyzing pertinent data and standardizing compliance processes.

Organizations often have thousands (or more) of active contracts to monitor for compliance. Evisort’s AI can scan all of the organization’s agreements for key regulatory clauses, helping teams quickly identify noncompliant language across the portfolio. In addition, Evisort enables teams to create custom remediation workflows to efficiently revise those noncompliant contracts ahead of regulatory deadlines.

As Mark Casady, Founder and General Partner of Vestigo Ventures and a member of the BNY Mellon Accelerator Program Venture Capital Advisory Board, says: “AI is the present and the future of financial services.”

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Interested in learning more? Read the BNY Mellon case study.