Duco has empowered one of the biggest European banks to streamline a formerly complex web of legacy technology. Our agile data automation platform has delivered huge efficiency gains, reducing operational risk and providing a significant return on investment.
The bank has seen enormous time savings by replacing legacy systems with our fast, agile solution. Transaction reconciliations that took 9 hours on one of the leading legacy technology systems complete in just 15 minutes on the Duco platform. Processes that used to take 45 minutes on another system run in 3 minutes on Duco.
These huge efficiency gains mean that project cycles at the bank are slashed from three months to just two weeks. It’s therefore not surprising that the volume of data being put through our platform grew thirteen-fold in the space of 36 months.
From system migration controls to global standardisation
Duco is the firm’s strategic internal-facing inter-system reconciliation platform. The bank has used our platform to implement a standardised global model and reduce operational risk. It sits in the Global Reconciliation Group (GRG), which delivers reconciliation services across group functions, implements reconciliation standards and has oversight of rec tools used across the group.
The firm originally utilised Duco to support an extensive 18-month migration for post-trade derivatives systems. The platform provided a vital control during the migration, which involved parallel running of multiple systems, as well as helping to clean up global account structures.
The project was a resounding success and so the firm decided to harness the potential of Duco to consolidate their derivatives reconciliations and eliminate end-user developed applications (EUDAs) and Excel and Access-based reconciliations.
The bank has since used our platform to implement a standardised global model and reduce operational risk. They have used to platform to establish gold standard controls globally across disparate offices for FICC, equity, OTC and listed derivatives. The groups 970 reconciliations have been consolidated down to just 200, and 400+ Excel spreadsheets were automated in an 18-month period.
All EUDAs have been eradicated from the firm, as well as the need for extract, transform and load technology and processes.
"Duco helped drive standardisation, consolidation and harmonisation efforts in Ops. Doing such a change project within the bank helped process improvement majorly, simplifying what is needed and how it’s built. Many recs on our previous system had been there for years or decades, and needed many improvements."
Speed doesn’t come at the cost of accuracy – in fact auto-match rates have increased 15% in one instance to above 99.99% and across all reconciliations are above 90%. The previous legacy solution was only able to achieve a match rate of between 60-70%.
On top of higher match rates, the bank also delivered much greater control and transparency for end users compared to its legacy platforms.
This has improved the auditability of processes, with the platform providing documentation and allowing the firm to trace controls back to requirements. Processes can better stand up to audit scrutiny and they are so much easier to understand that the firm is actually closing audit points one month earlier than its commitment to auditors requires.
"Our processes are more audit-proof now thanks to documentation and traceability back to requirements. Duco has a lot of useful audit trail stuff and more benefits come from the traceability. ‘How do I know what I want is complete and accurate?’. Traceability to business requirements, to UAT test results, to going into production - this is what can stand up to audit scrutiny more than what was there previously."
Before Duco, the bank’s staff had to request advanced technical support from the previous vendor to do simple things like revisit the results of the previous day’s reconciliations. The Duco platform is faster and easier to use, giving the team the latest technology to play with. Our platform is underpinned by a suite of AWS native services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Storage, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
While the platform is owned by the technology department in order to ensure that the firm has the correct governance and control around their data, due to the ease of use – in particular the no-code functionality – the operations team are able to use the platform themselves on a daily basis.
This agility brings many benefits, such as the ability to rapidly stand up new global branches. Previously these recs would have needed to be carried out manually. Now, the necessary reconciliations can be quickly built and automated, all while saving the firm money: Duco has slashed the cost of onboarding a new reconciliation from over $50,000 to under $5,000.
In total the Duco platform has delivered an annualised return on investment of millions of euros by eliminating several legacy technology solutions and 600 end user-developed applications (EUDAs).