Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best sell-side reconciliation platform—Duco

Overview

Much of the work operations and finance teams do today is manually intensive and therefore error-prone. Whether it’s manually rekeying unstructured data to be able to use it, managing reconciliations and other data processes with spreadsheets and manual workarounds for legacy technologies, or managing trade breaks and investigations via email, these processes are not fit-for-purpose in today’s capital markets. They’re time-consuming, expensive, not scalable or auditable, and are exposed to operational risks from human errors. These are some of the issues that keeps operations leaders up at night.

The solution  

Duco’s eponymous reconciliations platform eliminates manual work by combining:

• Flexible ingestion, including AI-powered, adaptive unstructured data extraction
• Natural rule language (NRL), enabling users to manage reconciliations
• Integrated data preparation capabilities to normalize and transform “messy” data
• Robust reconciliation with accurate matching, automated exception management, and transparent, self-documenting processes to support auditability

Duco manages data in any format, reconciling and publishing it for visualization or downstream integration.

Secret sauce  

• Integrated adaptive intelligent document processing (AIDP): uses AI to learn the context of data, not just location, and adapts when layouts change
• NRL: no-code, cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, enabling business users to spin up and/or manage reconciliation processes on their own without the need for large IT projects or managed services
• End-to-end capability: flexible ingestion, robust data preparation and reconciliation with automated exception management in one platform, reducing tech stack complexity and TCO

Recent milestones

Duco’s recent enhancements include:

• Ingestion: full integration of AIDP into the Duco platform, enabling proprietary AI models and large language models (LLMs); flexible ingestion of a growing list of industry and other structured formats
• Reconciliation: continued expansion of pre-configured templates for regulatory reporting controls; release of AI-powered label prediction to further automate exception management
• Governance: enhanced governance and control with additional sign-off, review and audit features, and integrated configuration deployment

Future objectives

• Ingestion and preparation: expanded data quality and validation capabilities in Duco’s data prep module
• Reconciliation: enhanced depo reconciliation capabilities, including new formats and expanded proofing; AI and agentic technology to automatically generate NRL to speed client time to value; extending AI for exception management with auto-categorizing, assigning, and clustering similar exceptions for easy resolution
• Dashboards: continue to extend in-platform dashboards, particularly for cash and exception management.

Why they won

It seems barely believable that Duco’s win this year in what has become one of the most keenly contested of all categories making up the Sell-Side Technology Awards is its first since 2019. The firm’s return to the winners’ circle is thanks to its outstanding recs platform of the same name, an offering that features four key attributes: flexible data ingestion, natural rule language allowing users to manage reconciliations themselves by creating their own custom rules, integrated data preparation functionality that normalizes and transforms messy data to support reconciliation, and sophisticated reconciliation functionality featuring accurate matching, automated exception management and impressive scalability. 

We’ve noted before in these and other WatersTechnology awards that data reconciliation as a business function is unlikely to set pulses racing across industry’s back offices, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important for firms to manage accurately, efficiently and transparently. Duco fits the bill perfectly for them to do that.