One of the world’s largest banks harnessed Duco’s data automation platform to replace manual processes and legacy technology, strengthen their reporting controls and provide reconciliation best practices across its global operations.
The client is constantly looking to benefit from economies of scale through the use of common platforms. To this end, they created shared service centres to deliver operational best practices across their subsidiaries. They use Duco as their global recs tool: a central team runs 500 reconciliations per day and processes around 8m lines of data for teams in locations including London, New York and Asia.
Reconciliations were chosen as the first activity to benefit from these shared service centres, given that they were a fragmented mixture of manual, semi-automated and automated processes, managed by business line and on a geographic basis.
The client had received recommendations from both internal and external auditors to get a more robust system in place that could automate reconciliations and also provide record keeping; the limitations of their third-party on-premise tool and two internal applications meant the bulk of their reconciliations were carried out manually in spreadsheets.
It took just six months to migrate 300 reconciliations, covering use cases including Front Office to Back Office (FOBO), market data and settlements, from the client’s on-premise system onto the Duco platform. The project was delivered 12 months ahead of schedule.
As well as automating the reconciliations, since the adoption of Duco the client has also been able to automate more exception analysis, accelerating time to resolution. The consolidation of all these processes has heightened transparency and improved trust in data, as managers can use Duco’s data platform to easily see all the details in a single dashboard.
“Duco has absolutely improved data quality.”
The client also uses Duco for a wide range of regulatory reporting use cases, leveraging the agility of the platform to quickly build complex automated controls and reduce the need to rely on spreadsheets.
The client harnessed the expertise of Duco’s Professional Services team to go live with fully-tested end-to-end reporting controls for SFTR in under 18 days. They use the data prep module to ingest data from multiple feeds, such as the DTCC and systems for FX, derivatives and fixed income, in order to consolidate, normalise and transform their reporting data.
The no-code functionality of the Duco platform has empowered the client to create complex validation rules instead of resorting to further manual processes, enabling them to ensure the accuracy of each of the 50 fields in their MiFID submission files and easily flag errors where the data is not an expected value.
“We can make changes without being dependent on other departments (e.g. when a bond changes). [With our previous system] you always had to make requests and wait for the work to be done in another department.”
The client now has robust and transparent audit controls. The flexibility of the Duco platform enables the client to be agile in the face of change while still ensuring their governance framework and best practices are followed. As a result they no longer get audit recommendations.
Their reconciliations are fully automated and spreadsheet-based controls have been eliminated. This has improved productivity for several reasons. The agility and no-code nature of the Duco platform enables the business to react quickly to changes or if a user identifies a more efficient solution to a business problem. Before Duco, such changes would have relied upon the availability of engineers.
The automation of break analysis has improved productivity and freed up teams to focus on the root cause of exceptions. Ultimately, this has enabled the team to provide a better service as they aren’t preoccupied with simply classifying recs.
These improvements have also resulted in a reduction in operational and technology risk.