Sell-Side Technology Awards 2022: Best sell-side reconciliation platform—SmartStream Technologies

OVERVIEW

Banks, under mounting pressure to reduce costs and drive-up efficiencies, are seeking to introduce greater longevity and versatility into their reconciliations infrastructure. They are also looking to improve interoperability and integration between systems and are keen to sharpen their insight into operations through more accurate business intelligence. To achieve these goals, they are standardizing and modernizing their systems, in the hope of creating an “evergreen” infrastructure that enables them to meet all future expectations.

THE SOLUTION

Transforming reconciliations processing cannot be realized without a robust and scalable digital infrastructure: Financial institutions require a powerful, capable tool if they are to consolidate and streamline processing activities successfully. TLM Reconciliations Premium is a single, highly scalable and flexible reconciliations solution providing enterprise-wide transaction management. It facilitates the consolidation of transactional silos and removes the need for point solutions at different stages of the reconciliations lifecycle. Capable of handling reconciliations of all types, the solution enables organizations to bring all reconciliations activities under one umbrella.

The introduction of new AI modules further reduces manual touch points as well as improves data quality and insight. Affinity, SmartStream’s latest machine learning technology, is employed by TLM Reconciliations Premium to observe users’ actions. It establishes its own understanding of how records correlate and assists the user to significantly reduce the time it takes for matching complex datasets. Once the neuronal network is trained, Affinity acts as a virtual user to support businesses dealing with large data volumes―the more it observes, the more efficient it becomes, boosting matching rates. 

TLM Reconciliations Premium may be accessed via a hosted service or deployed on-premises. The former option is particularly suitable for smaller banks, as there is no software footprint to install, minimizing infrastructure costs. A managed service is also available. 

A major global financial institution currently using SmartStream’s reconciliation onboarding service has experienced an improvement in auto-match rates in excess of 97%, while its exceptions have reduced by 67%.

WHAT’S TO COME

SmartStream reinvested 25% of its revenue last year back into research and development (R&D). It is continuing to increase the number of developers working on its solutions with the view to driving up automation levels and helping banks to improve service levels, stem operational losses, enhance margin management, and carry out more accurate data analysis.

Affinity will be embedded within the firm’s core solutions with the view to improving performance by 20% to 25%, enhancing the capability of its existing solutions, and delivering services that are more flexible and cost-efficient for its clients.

SmartStream increased its headcount by 10% during 2021. This growth is set to continue during 2022.

The growing interest in managed services and cloud deployments (which accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic) is reflected by the rising number of engagements, with bookings up by 50% at of the end of 2021.

WHY THEY WON

SmartStream continues its domination of the reconciliation category in these and the annual Buy-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its flagship TLM Reconciliations Premium platform. The addition of its Affinity observational learning functionality massively reduces processing times when reconciling complex datasets, while simultaneously enhancing accuracy and transparency.