Waters Rankings 2019: Best Reconciliations Management Provider: SmartStream

As more players in the reconciliations space turn to new technologies to streamline the reconciliations process, it’s SmartStream taking home the title of best reconciliations management provider in this year’s Rankings, unseating Broadridge, which had replaced two-time winner Electra.

SmartStream’s offering, TLM Reconciliations Premium, aims to take the onerous process from a data-matching function and shift it to an exception-investigation and resolution resource by tackling three central challenges. Those challenges, says the company’s product manager Robin Hasson, are reducing cost, managing increasing volumes and improving business intelligence.

“Volumes are being driven up by two forces: the centralization of all reconciliation activities onto a single platform and the consistently increasing use of digital payments,” Hasson explains. He adds that while clients increasingly look to reduce infrastructure costs by migrating to public and private clouds, the use of its hosted and managed service offerings can further reduce the need for large back-office systems.

Several updates have been made to the platform over the last year. For instance, SmartStream introduced artificial intelligence modules to help onboard new reconciliations and reduce the number of manual matches required by automatically matching uncategorized data, helping speed up time-to-market. A new user interface, TLM View, was also added to the offering, allowing businesses to restructure and interact with its operations and management information systems without the need to engage IT. At the same time, businesses can also build and test new and existing reconciliations using TLM SmartRecs without IT involvement.

Looking ahead, Hasson says the company will look to add even more value using AI and machine learning in areas such as monitoring risk and automation endeavors, as well as maintain a heavy focus on digital payments.