BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side reconciliation platform/service—Duco

Overview

Duco is a platform designed to automate operations on mission-critical data. It can be overlaid onto existing systems/platforms and used to manage multiple tasks, from extracting data through to preparing, validating, reconciling and publishing it to downstream systems. Duco helps buy-side firms’ short-staffed operations teams to manage their various functions, while improving data quality to support enhanced compliance and risk requirements, as well as allowing buy-side firms to maintain close relationships with their counterparties and service providers and mitigate staff churn/turnover.

The solution  

Duco is a no-code, end-user-driven SaaS platform that manages enterprise reconciliations. It is designed to put data in the hands of business users, reducing their dependency on their firms’ technology teams. The platform is data and use-case agnostic and is used to support investment operations; broker, custody and NAV controls; client servicing; and transaction and regulatory reporting. It enables operations teams to build operational controls 85% faster than legacy architecture and reduces risks associated with manual processing/workarounds.

Secret sauce  

Duco is a 100% cloud-native, SaaS-based reconciliation solution. It allows users to automate the processing of both structured and unstructured data without the need for separate extract, transform, load (ETL) tools. It uses proprietary AI models and GenAI capabilities to automate a number of time- and labor-intensive workloads, including data extraction, process setup and exception management, and can be deployed in days as opposed to months.

Recent milestones

• Duco acquired an AI-powered self-learning intelligence platform that reads and interprets any document (pdfs, emails, images, etc.) to extract and classify information and data.
• Duco enhanced its cash capabilities with scalability for high volumes and full integration with its data preparation platform.
• Duco launched its EMIR Refit service, which is preconfigured to the ISO XML format/standard and maintained by Duco. It can be used for upstream data or as a post-reporting control to demonstrate reporting accuracy.

Future objectives

Duco plans to:

• Expand its Adaptive Intelligent Document Processing (AIDP) offering to introduce new use-cases and additional features such as automatic document classification. It will also integrate its proprietary no-code natural rule language (NRL) functionality, enabling users to train and deploy AI models.
• Extend its exception management workflow, including AI capabilities, to help automate activities, including searching, labeling, assigning, repairing and signing-off
• Incorporate AI and other new capabilities into its data preparation module, and enhance dashboards for monitoring, actions, insights, and reporting

Why they won

Duco follows up its win in this category last year by winning it again, illustrating its appeal and versatility to all manner of buy-side firms. Data reconciliation might not set pulses racing across the buy side, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a critical function that capital markets firms need to get absolutely right with the minimum of manual intervention. 

Duco was one of the first reconciliation providers to fully embrace the managed service/cloud model, which has in recent years become too important for capital markets firms to ignore, especially those on the buy side. Of course, those investment managers that are wed to legacy or proprietary platforms implemented and maintained on their own premises still need to figure out how to wean themselves off their outdated platforms before taking the cloud route, but when they do, firms like Duco will be there to support them in their endeavors.