BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side reconciliation platform/service—SmartStream Technologies

After a five-year hiatus, SmartStream Technologies has reclaimed the reconciliations throne at this year’s Buy-Side Technology Awards. It marks the fifth win in this category for the software and managed services specialist.

At the heart of SmartStream’s offering is its TLM Reconciliations Premium platform, which aims to automate as much of the reconciliations process as possible in order to provide greater operational control and meet the growing number of regulations that firms are now facing. It combines artificial intelligence (AI) with a new user interface that allows for detailed reporting. As a result, trend analysis can be carried out in order to improve operational outcomes, better match rates, and to identify common exception patterns down to attribution levels. This allows non-technical business personnel, who have only limited training, to be able to customize the dashboard to fit their needs.

That is what the company won for, but SmartStream’s product offering is evolving as new tools and technologies become available. Most interesting is the release of SmartStream AIR, the firm’s cloud-native, AI-enabled reconciliations platform. AIR, which was unveiled at this year’s Sibos conference in London, is designed to allow users to manage their reconciliation needs on an ad hoc basis, while simultaneously significantly reducing reconciliations processing and configuration times.

In early November, Andreas Burner, chief innovation officer for blockchain and AI at SmartStream, told WatersTechnology that after working heavily on AIR for the past 18 months, “this is the birth of all our AI and machine-learning products.”

Through it, users can drop their records into the platform, which runs its machine-learning and NLP algorithms on these large datasets to reconcile discrepancies within those files. “The demos show that you can do it within three or four seconds, even though you might have 25,000 records,” he said. “We have tested it on 500,000 records and it’s super-fast.”