Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Reconciliation Platform/Service—Electra Information Systems

"Electra continues to introduce groundbreaking reconciliation features that truly make a difference to both management and end-users," says Todd Sloan, product manager and senior vice-president at Electra Information Systems. Sloan says investment managers are looking to do more than simply reconcile positions, transactions and cash balances, and that it is no longer acceptable for buy-side firms' reconciliation technologies to neglect non-traditional, complex reconciliation data like net-asset values (NAVs), pricing, profit and loss, security master data, customer relationship management data, and collateral management data. He says Electra has established through conversations with the buy side that the ability to support any and all types of data reconciliation is becoming increasingly important for the global investment management industry.

To this end, Electra added a number of enhancements to its reconciliation platform during the course of the last year to address those demands.

The offering, formerly known as OpenSTaARS, already supports automatic identification of exceptions and provides users with transparency around that process. But recent enhancements mean that now the platform allows buy-side firms to define NAV buckets that they use to calculate overall NAVs, and true n-way reconciliation, allowing them to compare multiple datasets within the same view and to compare large data volumes quickly and seamlessly.

Sloan notes that Electra’s reconciliation platform uses a proprietary algorithm that identifies and excludes duplicate data, while allowing genuine reconciliation updates to enter the workflow. It also allows users to drill down into any NAV calculation in order to see positions and transaction activities.

These enhancements put the Electra platform in a strong position to address buy-side demands if and when they arise in the future. “Whether by reducing the redundancy found within an end-user’s reconciliation process or by providing operational transparency to senior management, Electra strives to find ways to reduce costs, mitigate risk, and extend the reach of reconciliation for our clients,” Sloan says.

Electra has established through conversations with the buy side that the ability to support any and all types of data reconciliation is becoming increasingly important for the global investment management industry.

He adds that the vendor’s approach to develop functionality directly demanded by the firm’s buy-side clients has served it well over the years. Electra’s reconciliation platform also won the best reconciliation management provider category at this year’s Waters Rankings.