Sell-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Sell-Side Reconciliation Platform — SmartStream Technologies

Challengers have come and gone and attempted to wrest away SmartStream's crown, but for the time being at least, none has come close to unseating the incumbent market leader.

One of the trends that emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis is that of cost reduction, a theme that if anything has become more pressing and pervasive since 2008 as capital markets firms of all sizes continue to seek ways of reducing their fixed operating costs. When it comes to reconciliations, a business process residing in the dark recesses of the back office, firms need to manage the various functions around the process as efficiently and transparently as possible, even though such functions tend not to provide buy-side and sell-side firms with a competitive advantage. Given their cost-reduction and resource allocation concerns, firms are increasingly looking to share as much of the technology and processing burden as possible, themes that SmartStream addressed head on when, during the course of last year, it unveiled its Centre of Excellence (CoE) and confirmed in November that it already had 20 user-firms onboard with the utility.   

The CoE supports the entire reconciliation process, including the hosting of SmartStream’s TLM solutions within its OnDemand offering, monitoring the operating environment, loading data, and ensuring auto-matching is completed within agreed service-level agreements (SLAs), as well as performing manual matching and break resolution. According to SmartStream, working in partnership with its CoE has allowed financial institutions to realize some impressive benefits: Some have seen match rates in excess of 97 percent, while exceptions have been reduced in some instances by as much as 67 percent. One such firm, a large French investment bank, selected the CoE to onboard TLM Reconciliations Premium, SmartStream’s flagship offering, for its internal and external brokerage, and for its exchange-traded derivatives reconciliations. 

Looking to the future, SmartStream is planning on extending the remit of the CoE’s managed service to include not only reconciliations processing but other important TLM solutions, such as TLM Corporate Actions and TLM Cash & Liquidity Management.

SmartStrteam, thanks to its domination of the best sell-side reconciliation platform category over the years, also wins this year’s best sell-side technology provider of the year award (see page 61), which it shares with Numerix, the first year that the final and most prestigious category of the Sell-Side Technology Awards has been shared.—VBA