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Photo Courtesy of: WorldCC

LONDON, Nov. 09, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — A new global report released today by Commerce & Contract Management Institute (CCM Institute) has found that up to 80 percent of organizations lack clear accountability for contracting performance, leaving businesses exposed to inefficiency and risk in a period of persistent uncertainty, and that organizations that have successfully made technological advances in their contracting processes, are significantly better equipped to navigate market uncertainty.

The report, titled Benchmark report 2025: The Race Is On – Navigating Uncertainty Through CCM Resilience, was produced in partnership with the World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC), NCMA, and Sirion. It draws on global data from thousands of organizations across industries and regions to measure the maturity, capability, and resilience of contract and commercial management (CCM) functions.

According to the findings, 87 percent of organizations report operating under high and sustained levels of uncertainty, yet only a small proportion have established governance frameworks that clearly define responsibility for contracting outcomes. The absence of accountability, the report notes, continues to slow progress in operational performance, even as investment in digital tools and automation increases.

“This report is a clear mandate for immediate action,” said Sally Guyer, Chief Executive Officer of WorldCC. “For too long, organizations have treated commercial and contracting excellence as a complex, second-tier priority, and that has created a structural vulnerability we can no longer afford. The data is definitive: the organizations that will thrive in this ‘new normal’ are the ones who recognize that CCM is the catalyst for business resilience. We urge leaders to stop delaying this critical transformation and start addressing the foundational issues of accountability and leadership.”

The findings highlight a sharp decline in scepticism toward AI’s role in contracting, with over 80 percent expecting it to play a major role within the next two years. It underscores the accelerating presence and importance of AI in contracting. Beyond its established use in contract repositories, AI is increasingly being leveraged for contract creation and drafting, summary generation, and contract review. Obligation extraction has also emerged as a rapidly growing area of focus.

The benchmark highlights a growing divide between buy-side and sell-side organizations. Across all performance metrics, suppliers are outperforming buyers by more than 20%. This gap is attributed to differences in leadership alignment and organizational design, as well as levels of investment in full contract lifecycle technologies. While sell-side units tend to have clear commercial governance structures, buy-side teams are often fragmented, with many operating under procurement or finance functions that prioritize cost control over performance visibility.

The report also indicates that technology adoption alone is not closing the capability gap. The sell-side demonstrates a 37 percent technology advantage, averaging 8.41 digital capabilities per person compared with 6.52 on the buy-side. However, the data shows that digital systems deliver limited value without defined accountability and leadership oversight.

“Our research uncovers a fundamental governance failure,” said Tim Cummins, Executive Director of the CCM Institute. “When 70 to 80 percent of businesses lack a single point of clarity for contracting performance, it creates a system defined by inertia and risk. You cannot automate your way out of a governance crisis. The race for resilience will not be won by those who invest the most in new tools, but by those who first establish clear accountability, build adaptive leadership, and invest in the human talent needed for an AI-transformed future.”

The report identifies leadership, structure, and talent development as the key drivers of commercial resilience. Respondents citing high uncertainty ranked leadership quality (30 percent), unclear roles (27 percent), and organizational confusion (25–30 percent) among their most significant barriers to progress.

“Eighty-eight percent of enterprises now recognize that commercial and contract management excellence drives performance. The real question is: how do we turn that recognition into meaningful change?” said Ajay Agrawal, Founder and CEO of Sirion. “At Sirion, we see that evolution taking shape every day—as intelligence becomes part of the system itself, where data, context, and intent come together to guide every decision, every agreement, every action.”

The Benchmark Report 2025 concludes that while awareness of contracting’s strategic importance is high, structural change remains limited. The findings call for organizations to clarify ownership, strengthen leadership accountability, and align technology investments with measurable governance outcomes, much like the principles outlined in the Contract Management Standard (CMS). For leaders looking to close the accountability gap immediately, adopting the globally recognized CMS provides the necessary framework to establish this unified practice.

About the CCM Institute

The CCM Institute seeks to improve the world through higher standards in buying and selling. Its rigorous, practical research and insights, both relevant and useful, shape global policy and practice. The Institute helps society by driving up standards for the exchange of goods and services, resulting in better trading outcomes in both the private and public sectors. As a not-for-profit organization, it was founded and is supported by World Commerce & Contracting and NCMA.

About World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC)

World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC) is a global non-profit association dedicated to improving trading relationships and commercial effectiveness. With more than 80,000 members worldwide, WorldCC provides research, standards, training, and resources that enable organizations to achieve better commercial and contracting outcomes.

About Sirion

Sirion is the world’s leading AI-native CLM platform, pioneering the application of agentic AI to help enterprises transform the way they store, create, and manage contracts. By uniting an intuitive conversational experience with specialized AI agents, the platform has redefined enterprise contracting. The world’s most valuable brands trust Sirion to manage 7M+ contracts worth nearly $800B and relationships with 1M+ suppliers and customers in 100+ languages. For more information, visit www.sirion.ai.

About NCMA

The National Contract Management Association (NCMA) is the world’s leading professional association for contract management professionals. It provides certification, education, and research that elevate contracting standards and practices across industries and governments globally.

Contact Information

Kate Hodgins

Commerce & Contract Management Institute,

Email: info@ccm.institute

Website: https://ccm.institute/

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/03b14c05-bcb4-47fd-b488-e7a2552d9a09

The mounting problems facing poorer Americans are leaving the world’s most important economy exposed to risks of a downturn, a top Federal Reserve official has warned, highlighting the “balancing act” facing central bankers as they consider whether to cut interest rates again in December.

John Williams, president of the New York Fed, said data and conversations with community leaders highlighted that many poorer households were facing an affordability crisis.

“There is quite a bit of evidence . . . that lower and moderate-income households are facing some constraints from an affordability point of view,” Williams told the Financial Times. “From the cost of living, the housing costs and basically many families living month to month.”

Meanwhile, wealthier Americans were benefiting from the stock market “booming near all-time highs”.

With the US jobs market cooling, Williams signalled that what he dubbed the “disaggregated” behaviour of US households could be a factor in determining whether or not he thinks the Fed should cut borrowing costs in December — a vote he described as a “balancing act”.

While US growth overall had proven much more resilient than many economists had anticipated and inflation remained above the Fed’s 2 per cent goal, the pain felt by more vulnerable households because of the high cost of living meant the US economy could be knocked off course.

“Something could happen that cuts into confidence, or consumer spending growth that we’re seeing at the aggregate level may not be as robust, if you will, as it would be otherwise, given that a lot of folks are really, again, living month to month,” said Williams, who is also vice-chair of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

Fed officials — including chair Jay Powell and influential governor Christopher Waller — have started to focus more on how a labour market which Williams described as lacking “a lot of strength and momentum” could affect the economic prospects of normal Americans.

Powell and Waller have noted strong consumer spending is being disproportionately driven by the highest earners.

The pain felt by poorer and middle-income American households is also affecting the political climate, propelling Zohran Mamdani to victory in the race for New York mayor, where he ran on a platform of lowering living costs.

The poor showing of candidates backed by US President Donald Trump in the city’s mayoral race and votes for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey has also been linked to a crisis in affordability similar to that which plagued Joe Biden’s presidency.

The Fed has cut borrowing costs by a quarter-point at each of its past two policy votes because of evidence the US labour market was weakening.

Investors expected another move next month — up until late October when Powell said further cuts were far from a “foregone conclusion”.

“It’s really a balancing act,” the New York Fed president said in reference to the December vote. “These facts are fundamentally true — inflation is high, and it’s not showing signs of coming down right now. And at the same time, the economy is showing some resilience.”

While the US labour market was still “gradually cooling”, it was “not shifting more dramatically”. Unlike earlier in the year, “no one’s really talking about recession”, he said.

The US economy has performed better than many, including Williams, had feared. In April, he said Trump’s tariffs could drive inflation up as high as 4 per cent — and growth to “somewhat below 1 per cent”.

Much of the rebound in confidence has been down to gloom over trade tensions being replaced by optimism over a boom in artificial intelligence and AI-related investment.

Williams said projections that AI could substantially lift productivity growth were not “outlandish”, but reserved judgment on just how much impact he expected the technology to have.

While AI-related investments have spurred growth, soaring equity prices have sparked some concerns of a bubble.

“Is there going to be excessive investment? Are there going to be investments that company X succeeds or company Y doesn’t? Yes. But I think it’s happening because there’s something real going on, something fundamental going on,” he said. “And it doesn’t worry me, as long as it’s not highly leveraged, and a lot of it’s equity financed.”

At its October meeting, the Fed called time on its three-year quantitative tightening experiment — a policy which shrunk the central bank’s balance sheet by about $2tn — amid signs of funding strains in money markets.

Williams acknowledged funding pressures in the “past few weeks are definitely sending us pretty clear signals that the level of reserves have come down”.

However, he pushed back against some market calls to end QT ahead of the December 1 target set by the FOMC last week, saying allowing it to run through November “makes perfect sense”.

He also opposed Dallas Fed president Lorie Logan’s calls for the central bank to shift its benchmark interest rate from the federal funds target range to a rate more reflective of borrowing costs in repo markets.

“I’ve been on the FOMC a while now, so we’ve discussed this at length, I think, a few times, and we looked at it very carefully and thought about it carefully, and each time we have decided to stay with the federal funds rate as the policy rate,” he said.

The New York Fed president did not subscribe to Powell’s view that a lack of official economic data — the result of the continuing government shutdown — would make a cut less likely.

“We will get more information regardless of the state of the government shutdown,” Williams said. “We have developed over, I would say, over 100 years, a remarkable set of indicators and measures of this state of the US economy.”

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An increasing number of wealthy Chinese people are trying to set up family offices and secure residency in the Gulf, a reflection of growing frustration with the increased difficulty of establishing themselves in Singapore, long a popular destination for rich Asians.

In the past year, there has been a rise in enquiries from Chinese nationals eager to relocate to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, according to private bankers and advisers to the ultra rich. Setting up family offices can ease the process of securing citizenship or residency.

“They are attracted [to the Gulf] by the ability to get residency status and live and enjoy stability,” said Mike Tan, Standard Chartered’s Singapore-based global head of wealth planning and family advisory, of those enquiring about setting up family offices in the Gulf.

Tan said the number of enquiries about Dubai that Standard Chartered had received from east Asian clients had surged in the past year, though the bank declined to provide numbers.

The UAE golden visa, which offers residency for 10 years and is available to investors, some family members and some high skilled workers, “is very attractive, and it is stable and benign from a tax perspective,” he said. Authorities in the United Arab Emirates said they issued nearly 80,000 golden visas in 2022 in a sharp increase from 47,000 the previous year, the latest figures to be made publicly available.

The number of family-related entities in Dubai’s offshore financial centre hit 1,000 at the end of the first half of this year, according to official figures, compared with 800 at the end of last year and 600 at the end of 2023. There is no breakdown on origin, but advisers say that much of the rise can be attributed to Chinese individuals.

Such is the influx of wealthy customers to the Gulf, said Prashant Tandon, managing director of wealth manager Lighthouse Canton’s UAE business, that there is a shortage of financial professionals who speak Chinese.

Tandon said he had seen the greatest movement towards the United Arab Emirates among those with assets of $50mn-200mn — “the mid-segment” of high net worth individuals — who are “a lot more entrepreneurial” and may be feeling business pressures in mainland China or Hong Kong. 

“A lot of families have sold Singaporean real estate to reinvest in the UAE,” said Yann Mrazek, managing partner at M/HQ, which assists with setting up structures for fund managers and family offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Harsh Covid lockdowns in places such as China and Singapore had first triggered the interest in Gulf hubs, he said.

“Singapore has very restrictive immigration rules — they want to ensure the right people come in,” said an adviser to wealthy families in the city-state. “It is relatively easy to set up a family office and get employment passes, but much harder to get residency and citizenship.”

But while Dubai’s family office market is growing fast, it has years of catching up to do with Singapore.

Government incentives prompted many wealthy foreigners to consider setting up family offices in Singapore in recent years as part of a pathway to becoming permanent residents. The number of family offices in Singapore rose by 43 per cent last year to more than 2,000.

“For a while, people were setting up family offices as a status symbol in Singapore — if your friend had one, you should have one too,” said Kevin Teng, chief executive of wealth manager Wrise Private Singapore. “But it meant a lot of these entities weren’t doing very much.”

Singapore granted an average of 33,000 permanent residencies and 21,300 citizenships a year over the past five years, according to the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority, which does not disclose the number of applicants. Immigration consultants report the approval rate can be as low as 8.25 per cent.

A money-laundering case, believed to be the city state’s largest, involving individuals linked to a gang from China’s Fujian province prompted greater scrutiny of individuals and flows.

More crypto entrepreneurs from China are also looking to set up in the Middle East, said Teng. There are now 39 cryptocurrency companies fully licensed by VARA, Dubai’s special regulator for the sector.

“In the crypto and digital asset space, they [Chinese clients] are looking at how friendly the local regulators are,” said Teng. “A lot of the time it can be down to how much risk appetite the different jurisdictions have and Singapore is being a bit more risk averse, certainly compared to Dubai.” 

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has granted 36 licences for digital payment companies, though it began cracking down on unlicensed crypto exchanges this summer. “Clients are increasingly going to the Middle East,” said Teng. “That is definitely a growing business segment for us.”