AFTAs 2025: Most innovative third-party technology vendor (operations)—AutoRek

Overview

AutoRek treats innovation as a core operational practice. Teams are encouraged to question established workflows, prototype quickly, and apply AI-driven techniques to real-world reconciliation challenges. This practical approach enables continuous improvements in matching, exception handling and data control, ensuring the platform evolves in direct response to emerging operational needs.

Surfacing innovation  

Innovation at AutoRek is driven through weekly engineering time dedicated to experimentation, active collaboration with Microsoft’s Innovation Labs and open contribution from all product teams. Ideas progress rapidly from prototype to release, with engineers owning features end-to-end. This structure consistently surfaces new techniques that enhance data processing, rules configuration and reconciliation workflows.

Examples of innovation  

AutoRek recently:

• Introduced AutoRek Mion, enabling high-precision matching for digital assets up to 18 decimal places, and AutoRek ARIA, an AI agent framework that learns from operational activity to reduce manual intervention
• Achieved Microsoft Solutions Partner Certified Software Designation for Financial Services AI, validating its delivery of sector-specific AI capabilities
• Released new operational tools developed through weekly “Innovation Time,” including features that streamline data validation steps and simplify complex rule configuration

Future focus

AutoRek is focusing on:

• Expanding autonomous AI agents to manage multi-step reconciliation tasks, reduce manual touchpoints and accelerate global processing cycles
• Scaling digital asset support to address rising transaction volumes and new regulatory requirements
• Delivering two new products focused on rulebook compliance and AI-enabled data conditioning to strengthen operational control and readiness

Why they won

For AutoRek, WatersTechnology awards must seem like London buses: Nothing for a while and then suddenly two arrive simultaneously. This is precisely what happened in Q4 of this year, when the London-based reconciliation specialist lifted two awards in consecutive months by winning the best buy-side reconciliation platform/service category in the recent Buy-Side Technology Awards and the most innovative third-party technology vendor (operations) category in the AFTAs.

AutoRek’s win in this category comes on the back of its culture of innovation that permeates the entire business, where, among other things, it embeds innovation directly into its daily engineering practices and by so doing, delivers measurable operational gains. Weekly experimentation time, close collaboration with Microsoft’s Innovation Labs and full ownership of features allow teams to progress from ideation to production with minimal lag. Recent advances introduced by AutoRek include digital asset matching, an AI agent framework that learns from real-world activities and reduces the need for manual intervention, and tools designed to simplify validation and rule configuration.

AutoRek’s product roadmap will extend the use of autonomous agents across the middle and back offices, expand its digital assets coverage/support, and develop products to help improve compliance and data quality across reconciliation workflows.