A Financial Services Gift Card Network Eliminates Manual Contract Work and Achieves Second-Response Times with Leah

A financial services gift card and prepaid card network, an established financial services company operating a gift card and prepaid card partner network, faced mounting operational challenges with their legacy SharePoint-based contract management system. The distributed legal team managed a complex portfolio of agreements across Content Provider, Distribution Partners, Incentives, and Wholesale business units—each with sophisticated parent-child contract structures where amendments were critical to business operations.

The manual burden was substantial. Attorneys spent significant time on administrative tasks, individually tracking governing law, payment terms, obligations, and other metadata for every contract record. When business stakeholders across the organization asked contract questions—a frequent occurrence—responding required hours of manual contract review by legal staff.

The system's fundamental limitation was its dependence on pre-configured metadata fields determined during initial setup. When new business questions or regulatory requirements emerged—such as California's gift card legislation requiring identification of specific provisions across thousands of agreements—the team faced the prospect of manually reviewing the entire contract repository. The system couldn't retrospectively extract information that hadn't been previously tagged.

Global operations created additional compliance challenges. With contracts in seven actively-used languages (Dutch, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and French), teams needed translation capabilities. However, company information security policies prohibited public translation tools like Google Translate for confidential documents. Teams resorted to unauthorized workarounds, creating both compliance risk and potential exposure of confidential information.

Contract managers spent multi-day sessions—described as three-day efforts—on bulk upload activities. Leadership lacked comprehensive visibility across business units, making it difficult to get portfolio-wide views for strategic decision-making.

A financial services gift card and prepaid card network selected Leah CLM to replace their legacy system, seeking a comprehensive platform that could handle complex contract structures, high volumes, and global requirements. The solution provided several critical capabilities that directly addressed their operational challenges.

The platform's flexible workflow engine supported configuration across eight different application types—commercial, corporate, vendor, non-disclosure agreements, content provider, distribution partners, incentives, and wholesale contracts. Unlike rigid legacy systems, the solution could accommodate Black Hawk's sophisticated parent-child contract structures and complex amendment management requirements.

Critical integration capabilities enabled connection with Dynamics CRM, extending contract visibility beyond the legal team to sales and commercial stakeholders. This integration would ultimately support end-to-end contract lifecycle management from opportunity through execution and amendment.

In November 2024, Black Hawk chose to expand their investment by upgrading to the Leah platform, adding artificial intelligence-powered capabilities to their established CLM deployment. The AI enhancement introduced automated contract extraction that could capture terms, obligations, and metadata from uploaded agreements without manual data entry. Ask Leah conversational search would enable instant answers to contract questions across the entire repository. One Drop functionality promised to streamline bulk upload processes.

The enterprise-grade translation capabilities provided a compliant alternative to unauthorized workarounds, delivering accurate translation across their seven active languages while maintaining information security standards.

The Contract Manager led the migration from SharePoint to Leah, managing a complex transition involving 77,885 documents with over 160,000 attachment files. The implementation team configured workflows across multiple business units and contract types, each with unique requirements and approval processes.

The migration progressed in phases, prioritizing Content Provider contracts—the highest business priority with over 14,000 agreements—followed by Distribution Partners and other business units. The Leah migration team worked closely with Black Hawk's contract management staff, conducting weekend implementations to meet critical deadlines including a June 21st CRM integration launch.

The implementation faced technical challenges in mid-2024 when system upgrades temporarily affected functionality. The team managed these obstacles through collaborative problem-solving, maintaining focus on user adoption and data quality. The Contract Manager took a deliberate crawl-walk-run approach, initially limiting access to a core group of contract managers for training on system setup and data entry protocols before broader rollout.

"We emphasized proper data quality from the start—if you don't do it correctly, everything else suffers."

— Contract Manager, a financial services gift card and prepaid card network

By late 2024, the system had stabilized with established workflows and growing user adoption. The successful base implementation positioned Black Hawk to add AI capabilities. In February 2025, Leah features went live in production, with full repository extraction across the entire contract portfolio scheduled for completion by April 15th, 2025.

The Dynamics CRM integration became operational, enabling sales users to access contract data and request amendments through integrated workflow. This extended contract visibility and lifecycle management capabilities across the organization.