Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Reconciliation Provider—Duco

Christian Nentwich, CEO of Duco, says buy-side firms have been looking for a more self-service platform that can be easily deployed. “We’re the only self-service reconciliation platform that enables operations people to load data and configure the whole thing from scratch without any sort of infrastructure technology project—this is why our clients like us,” Nentwich says. “We work directly with operations [and] with the business, giving them the ability to do things themselves, which they usually have to depend on technologists for.”

Duco Cube can be up and running within 24 hours, according to the company, and does not require a revamp of end-users’ technology stacks. The platform is also constantly updated, Nentwich says, pushing out upgrades monthly, including the addition of enhanced analytical capabilities to the platform and ways to use reconciled data. He notes that many clients are looking to use more of information that goes through reconciliation to figure out not just where breaks might occur, but also to understand more about their own business.

Reconciliation services, Nentwich says, are even more important today since most of the buy side still insists on using spreadsheets, despite an industry-wide push toward automation. “On the buy side, despite all the money that’s being spent on automation, there’s still a lot of reconciliation that gets done on Excel,” Nentwich says. “Many firms, when they move on to Duco, are actually moving away from spreadsheets for the first time.”

Continuing to manage reconciliations manually is set to become operationally risky for buy-side firms due to increased regulations like the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), set to come into force of January 3 next year. In fact, Nentwich says, many asset managers have approached Duco with the view to setting up reconciliations services as quickly as possible as the implementation day nears. “We’re marching towards the Mifid II deadline and there are people rushing to us who are unprepared and need a reconciliation system because it’s mandatory under the rule,” Nentwich explains. “There’s going to be more of that, I think, because they might have a reconciliation program, but it takes so long to configure that there’s just not enough time to set one up—so they come to us.”