SmartStream leads the world in transaction reconciliations

SmartStream Technologies regional director Richard Cummings loves a challenge, which is why he is spearheading the company's Asian growth.

SmartStream Technologies regional director Richard Cummings loves a challenge, which is why he decided to move from the company’s UK headquarters to spearhead its Asian growth this July. Of course Cummings is no stranger to the region, having previously worked in the region with both Reuters and Sungard. Today SmartStream, which is known primarily for being a market leader in transaction reconciliations, has developed its web based solution suite to many more areas than just transaction reconciliations.

It is the flexibility of the system that Cummings is now demonstrating to the company’s existing customer group in the region in a series of events throughout the rest of 2008. “We are the global leader in reconciliations and have the best matching algorithm in the world. We have invested significantly in the solution architecture to allow a much wider range of inputs to be matched and reconciled than before. This means we can now do automatic matching and reconciliation throughout a bank from Treasury through to cash management and trade financing,” said Cummings.

SmartStream, which is best known in Asia for its SSR and Corona products, is now working on customizing its web based software to different banks’ requirements so they can match and reconcile a much wider data set than before. And because this is all done through wizards rather than hard coding, a typical bank implementation can be done by a small team of four to six people in as little as 3 months. Why does this matter? “Typically a bank may have ten different reconciliation systems across FX, Cash Management, Trade and others, none of which can reconcile with each other. Our platform enables transactions to go right throughout the bank which from a risk management perspective gives much greater visibility to the bank.”

But it is also the people dimension that is proving valuable to clients. Cummings cites an example where a well known, global bank which had a team of 53 people handling 60 million payments a year with 92 per cent of transactions automatically matching.
That sounds great until you realize that with 8 per cent of transactions needing to be manually matched and reconciled, those 53 people were handling 4.8 million transactions a year. Now the bank has upgraded to SmartStream TLM Reconciliations they are finding they have an automatic match rate of 98 per cent and are handling 90 million transactions annually with just 42 people. “Even during this financial crisis, banks realize that as volumes grow they cannot simply throw more people at the problem and that is where we can help them with their business problems.”