In 2021, client, institutional and markets-related data is the new fuel upon which the embers of business commercial productivity and service line opportunity creation burns. As such, the funds, portfolio and trades / orders middle- and back-office reconciliations management function within any asset management, institutional investor or corporate and investment banking firm is a space ripe for a step change in terms of an overdue increase in technological sophistication, largely through the development and uptake of Cloud data management platforms and the total cost of ownership reductions that they can bring equally for business and operations functions.
The GreySpark-assessed outcome of the findings of the technology vendor reconciliations management platform survey shows that, in 2021, the participating companies are working with their respective user bases to drive down the TCO of the offerings and thus increase the vitality of their clients’ middle- and back-office operations functions using:
- Cloud-based Hosted Solutions – Thereby providing smaller client company types with a cost-effective offering that is not appropriate for on-premises deployment;
- Data Format Type Agnosticism – Allowing users to maximise the platform’s potential benefits for their firm or institution by making screen views and their underlying APIs desktop configurable, thus reducing IT personnel inputs when it comes to onboarding new reconciliations processing types;
- User Partnerships – Working with specific end-users within existing and new client company types to develop reconciliations processing types based on their experience and real-world, end-investor client use cases;
- Real-time Data Processing – Incrementally increasing the underlying Cloud real estate of any reconciliations platform over time to ensure all its functionality it optimised for peak performance;
- Data Cleanliness Advisory – Working with both specific end-users and their third-party market / trade / transaction / tick data providers to ensure any issues with reconciliations data quality are addressed upstream at their source such that the necessary ‘true’ data is what flows into the reconciliations processing system, thus increasing the effectiveness of straight-through processing; and
- AI & Machine Learning Functionality – Experimenting with new techniques and toolkits such that a greater level of understanding on how best to automate manual tasks is acquired over time, thus optimising break allocation and break management processes.
This report reviews the functional capabilities of:
- Aqua Global Solutions e2gen Reconciliations Modules & Aquila Reconciliation Module;
- Calixys XREC;
- Electra Information Systems Electra Reconciliation;
- FIS Global FIS Data Integrity Manager; and
- Fund Recs (Launch Pad Technologies) Fund Recs Velocity.
