Let the Blood Flow Again

Think back to the last time you had to negotiate an NDA with an enterprise. Do you wish to get those weeks of your life back? Now imagine a more complex contract. Now imagine it with a financial institution. It doesn’t get any better, but it needn’t be this bad.

Data is the lifeblood of any business, and contracts are one of the vital vessels carrying that precious cargo through the body of an organization. They help organizations map out all of their client and vendor relationships and lay out the nature of each, covering scope, duration, fee structures and resources, among many other terms and conditions. Understanding what is in them and optimizing how to generate and negotiate them, can be the difference between an organization with high cholesterol and plaque covered arteries, to a finely tuned and clean circulatory system of a world class athlete.

Turning fat financial institutions to trim athletes – efficiently through smarter contracting – is precisely what Co-Founders Shelby Austin (CEO), Abrar Huq (CRO) and Jonathan Wong (CTO) have set out to do with Arteria AI. In other words, let the blood flow again.

As lawyers themselves, Shelby and Abrar have seen firsthand the inefficiencies of contract management within an organization. Business users aren’t trained in legalese and don’t know what all the inputs for a contract should be, terms are lost in translation in back-and-forth emails and legal has to spend time drafting and then negotiating individual contracts, all through manual platforms (email and Microsoft Word). Post-execution, teams have no insight into their contract portfolio: which terms make up each, what contracts are expiring, which clauses are most frequently negotiated or escalated? All of this has led to inefficient processes and missed revenue opportunities across the many lines of business at banks, globally. This is the plaque. Can you feel the atherosclerosis setting in?

Arteria is a modular, AI-enabled contract lifecycle management tool focused on end-to-end contract management for financial services. It covers everything from contract drafting, negotiation, management and workflow, analytics and extraction all in a no / low-code DIY environment. It helps customers templatize and automate contract generation and negotiation, letting business lines better leverage their internal legal resources and become more efficient at client onboarding and generating top line revenue. Arteria provides the healthy diet a bank’s line of business needs to keep a coronary at bay. For us at Information Venture Partners, this is a value proposition that gets us excited! And has us eating more salads and fewer burgers.

Over the last several months, we’ve had the opportunity to get to know Shelby and her terrific team and see firsthand the platform they’ve been able to deliver to all of their customers. Don’t just take our word for it. Customers (some of the world’s largest banks) have raved about the truly unique capabilities, allowing them to sift through tens of thousands of contracts to identify and comply with regulatory changes and leverage Arteria’s natural language processing functionality to generate and negotiate simple contracts, improving efficiency by 50% or more. What really excites us is how Arteria is set to evolve. Much like any organic matter, the platform will become richer as it matures. We envision a world where Arteria will leverage its clause and template libraries to auto generate high volume contracts, it’s AI-enabled playbook rules will auto negotiate and approve simple terms and escalate complex ones and its analytics module will provide business lines all the insights they need into their contract portfolio. In this world, customers will improve their contract turnaround time and their top line, all while refocusing legal resources to higher value, more complex (negotiations) work and in the process become more efficient.

Shelby and her team have all cut their teeth leading Deloitte’s Omnia AI practice and have not only the legal background, but also the technical knowledge and entrepreneurial experience to clean the contractual process buildup at the world’s leading financial institutions. We’re pumped to partner with the entire Arteria team and are looking forward to getting the organizational blood flowing again!

– Rob, Hasan, Brendan and the Information Venture Partners team