Achieving All-encompassing Reconciliation Across Capital Markets Functions

Capital markets firms have been reconciling data for as long as any of us can remember.  However, unlike the situation in some other industries, true enterprise-wide reconciliation practices housed in one repository have eluded the industry for years.  Why?  In one word: complexity.  However, that does not, and should not, eliminate the common goal we all have for operational efficiency, risk management and highly effective compliance.

Position reconciliations in the investment space are so versatile and complex that creating a centralized platform for reconciling everything from FX (foreign exchange) positions, stocks, bonds and derivatives, intercompany balances, front office, back office and custodian activity and positions, has never been easily achieved in a cost effective environment.  Until now.

For years the investment space has tried to reconcile balances on elusive security identifiers that differ from industry to industry, from broker to broker, from custodian to custodian.  Add a cross-border ticker and you get even more versatile security identification.  Firms in the investment space have tried hard to find a unifier for years.  However, maintaining comprehensive securities master files and buying expensive data and updates from external vendors has, at times, proven futile and added even greater complexity.

So companies have had a choice: use expensive, error prone human resources, or invest in old-generation, client-server batch based systems that are unable to effect even the simplest of corrections in anything close to real time.

ReconArt’s Position Reconciliation combines the ease of use and performance of a ledger reconciliation with the break and case management capabilities of a cash reconciliation all tailored towards the needs of the investment industry’s matching needs. With its ability to update balances intra-day and drill down into trade details ReconArt offers unprecedented control on both balance and detail level.  Furthermore, it can process millions of positions every minute and keep the front, client facing, end clean as a whistle.

The secret lies in leveraging the latest proven technology coupled with ReconArt’s design to deliver absolute simplicity of the approach: being able to compare and match instruments on any criteria and any logic; being able to calculate and match reports from different sources in an instant; retaining a full audit trail and break resolution management; and allowing for near real time updates of existing position reconciliations.