Citizens Bank Brings Visibility and Intelligence to Contracting with Icertis

Challenge

Growing complexity exposed the need for better contract visibility and control

Citizens Bank, one of the largest regional banks in the United States, operates in a highly regulated environment where contracts are central to procurement, risk management, compliance, and third-party relationships.   

Hugh Peltz, Senior VP of Procurement and Property Corporate Services, and his team manage thousands of vendor agreements that support critical business operations at the bank.  

As the organization continues to grow, the contracting process has become increasingly difficult to manage. Negotiations often require coordination across procurement, legal, risk, compliance, and business stakeholders. The process was largely manual, creating limited visibility into where agreements stood and how quickly they were progressing through review and approval cycles. Vendor onboarding and contracting could take up to 12 months after a purchasing decision.

Additionally, Citizens is embarking on a broader initiative to reinvent its banking through an AI-centric, customer-first strategy. To support that vision, the bank needed better access to the information contained within its contracts and greater transparency into contractual obligations, risks, and business commitments

"Right now, it's very manual. It's a time-consuming process. We wanted unprecedented insights into our contracts - to be able to query them in real time and get feedback faster,”  Hugh says.

Hugh and his team recognized that contracts contained valuable business intelligence but accessing that information quickly and consistently was a challenge. Whether responding to risk-related questions, evaluating supplier relationships, or supporting business stakeholders, teams needed a faster and more effective way to find answers.  

Solution

Creating a foundation for intelligent, connected contract management

Citizens selected the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform to modernize contract management processes and create a foundation for greater visibility into agreements across the organization. The initial deployment focuses on procurement and real estate contracts

The bank chose Icertis because it believed it was the platform best positioned to support both immediate operational requirements and long-term enterprise strategy. Beyond contract lifecycle management, Citizens sees value in Icertis' analytics, obligation management, and AI capabilities, as well as the platform's ability to provide greater insight into contractual relationships and associated risks.

Benefits

Positioning contracts as a source of business intelligence and better decision-making

Currently, Citizens Bank executes about 3,500 contracts annually through the sourcing process. As part of the transformation, Citizens is simplifying and standardizing its contracting framework, reducing its contract templates by more than 50% - from nine contract templates to four core templates - supported by a centralized clause library, creating a more consistent approach to contract creation and negotiation.

The platform will provide stakeholders with easier access to contract information and greater transparency into contract activity, supporting the bank's long-term vision for more intelligent and data-driven operations.

"We're going to gain unprecedented insight into our contracts. We'll be able to query them in real time, understand obligation management, and really look at the broader ecosystem that Icertis can provide around contracts," says Hugh.

Through automation and planned AI-driven capabilities, Citizens expects to reduce the time and effort required to manage contracts by up to 50%, enabling teams to focus on higher-value work. Equally important, the bank will gain greater visibility into contractual obligations and contract data, helping stakeholders access information faster and make more informed decisions.

For Hugh, the opportunity is ultimately about helping teams spend less time searching for information and more time acting on it. He says, "We'll have very clear visibility into the changes that we make to our language. If we have divergence in our clauses, we're going to have real-time insights." 

As Citizens advances its AI-centric business strategy, contract intelligence is expected to play an important role in providing the visibility, governance, and context needed to support smarter decision-making across the enterprise.