Adyen is moving to a legal AI platform built for the broader set of teams that manage legal, regulatory and compliance risk. The goal is to both build on the quality and pace of work, make trusted support available where colleagues already work, and enable more work to be handled effectively in-house.
The decision reflects how Adyen wants its risk and control functions, including Legal, to develop. As one of the world’s largest payments companies and a bank regulated across three continents, it needs its legal, regulatory, and compliance teams to operate with both pace and consistency. Wordsmith will build on those teams’ existing strength, enabling more work to be handled effectively in-house while keeping judgement and oversight with qualified experts.
Evolving from legal tool to business platform
Adyen had already invested in legal AI through a tool primarily built for law firms. Its evaluation was not about fixing a failing legal function, but about finding a platform better suited to the broader set of teams that manage legal and regulatory risk across a fast-moving business. Adyen wanted a platform that could connect with the applications its people already use, with a strong Word experience, offering automations rather than relying on manual actions, and equal support for Mac users. It wanted a single front door for legal and regulatory requests, instead of intake spread across some twenty inboxes around the world.
Crucially, the platform needed to support Legal alongside Regulatory, Compliance, Enterprise Risk, Internal Control, Internal Audit and Procurement. Wordsmith met that brief.
Built for legal, risk and compliance across the business
Most parts of a business rely on software designed for how they work: finance on the ledger, sales on the CRM and engineering on its own stack. Adyen saw an opportunity to give the functions that manage legal, regulatory and compliance risk a shared platform connecting work already taking place across inboxes, documents and chat.
By early 2025, Adyen had processed payments for more than one billion consumers globally. It needs to move at the pace the world’s biggest brands expect while meeting the standards required of a regulated financial institution. Wordsmith connects with the tools where work already happens: a commercial manager can get an answer in Slack before a deal stalls; a question in Gmail can be resolved without a separate ticket; and selected Google Drive folders can be synced into Wordsmith for use in reviews or agents. This gives Adyen another way to combine speed with the oversight its work demands.
The technology underneath
Wordsmith draws on several frontier models, and optimises between them automatically, rather than leaning on a single model and manual prompt configuration. Privacy was central to Adyen’s evaluation: its privacy counsel was involved early, and Wordsmith’s approach to anonymised data processing and DPA and MSA support helped inform the decision.
Live workflows, with a wider rollout ahead
During the pilot, teams across Legal Regulatory, Compliance, Risk, Internal Control and Procurement began using Wordsmith on live work, with Internal Audit set to join them as the rollout continues. Each workflow operates within guardrails set by Adyen: routine requests can use approved playbooks and knowledge, while exceptions and matters requiring judgement go to the relevant team for human review and approval.
- Vendor contracts: a planned workflow is designed to support more than 100 contracts a month, routing requests received by email to the relevant playbook and returning a proposed redline in Word for legal review before anything is sent.
- Ask Legal: an agent answers routine questions in an internal channel of around 2,000 people, using an approved knowledge base of more than 120 pages. Questions outside those agreed parameters are passed to the legal team, while the agent learns from the manual answers provided.
- Intake and routing: a planned workflow will classify incoming documents and route them to the right playbook or team. Legal will retain approval through a dedicated Slack channel before any response goes out.
- Regulatory scanning: scheduled agents run recurring scans and deliver the findings through Slack and email.
- Contract intelligence: lawyers can search large document sets and identify relevant provisions across thousands of files, then assess the findings in context.
“AI can help Adyen's legal and other second-line teams scale their expertise more efficiently and consistently across the business. We get there faster when the tooling lets them automate the repetitive, operational parts of the job while keeping judgment and oversight with the people responsible. That's what we looked for, and it's why we chose Wordsmith. It helps us build on the expertise already within our teams and apply it more consistently and faster across the business. Colleagues get instant answers based on approved guidance, while our experts remain involved where their judgement matters.”
said Mats Klein Breteler, Principal Counsel at Adyen.
About Wordsmith
Wordsmith is the legal AI platform that improves how in-house teams work. It connects natively to the tools teams already use, lets the wider business self-serve on routine legal work while legal stays in control, and reduces reliance on external counsel.
About Adyen
Adyen (AMS: ADYEN) is the financial technology platform of choice for leading companies. By providing end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights and financial products in a single global solution, Adyen helps businesses achieve their ambitions faster. With offices around the world, Adyen works with businesses including Uber, Meta, Spotify, Microsoft and eBay. Adyen is a regulated credit institution, holding banking licences across the EU, the UK and the US.
