Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Reconciliation Platform—SmartStream

Buy-Side Technology created this award last year in response to the growing demand for post-trade processing functionality. With the increased volume of transactions, increased regulatory scrutiny, and the complex, cross-asset nature of these transactions, reconciliation platforms have become a hot sell as firms look to curb risk and cost implications. It’s a testament to what SmartStream has accomplished that it is the only winner of this award, repeating last year’s success.

“Recognizing the pressures firms are under—increasing regulation, cost management, the need for greater operational efficiency, and demand for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) within their infrastructure—we created an entirely new product to deliver a single transaction-processing platform across multiple instrument types,” says David Penney, executive vice president of strategy and product management.

SmartStream’s solution, TLM Reconciliations–Premium, provides users with operational control by consolidating fragmented and siloed infrastructures for equities, fixed income and derivatives, into an automated transaction-processing platform, according to Penney.

Over the last year, SmartStream has included support for SQL Server as a standard service, has added new proofing approaches for exchange-traded derivatives transactions, and made upgrades to the net-asset value (NAV) reconciliation process workflow.

The vendor also launched TLM Account Reconciliation, which leverages TLM Reconciliation–Premium’s matching engine to deliver enhanced processing for general ledger operations. SmartStream has made this solution available both as a standalone or as a service within TLM Reconciliations–Premium.

“It creates a unified, automated platform for account reconciliation and balance-sheet substantiation that provides enhanced transparency to financial controllers,” Penney says. “It delivers significant cost reductions through the retirement of multiple legacy systems and spreadsheets, while also reducing the resources required to perform the financial close in a shorter period of time.”

Another addition to the company’s offering is SmartStream’s partnership with Genpact to make TLM Account Reconciliation available as a business-process-as-a-services (BPaaS) offering. —AM