2026 is the year of agentic. The next evolution of AI combines the intelligence and analytical capabilities of generative AI with the ability to form strategies, take action and fulfil goals.
That’s an impressive promise, especially given the context of an increasingly complex and demanding operating environment. We know from our clients that they need to do more – a lot more – with the same resources. Budgets are staying flat but volumes are going up, as is regulatory scrutiny and focus on data quality.
So it’s no wonder most of the industry is now promising ‘AI-powered’ platforms to meet the needs of today’s Ops teams. But many of these are concepts that exist only in slides.
Duco has already helped more than 200 financial services clients automate boring, risky, and error-prone manual work in the post-trade lifecycle. And in November we announced agentic workspace: the next frontier in the drive to automate and conquer the data challenges holding the industry back.
For too long, Operations teams have been forced to work the same way, dealing with false exceptions and data they can’t trust. Agentic workspace changes that. It’s not just a capability that will enable you to work faster and more efficiently. It completely changes what your team works on, creating a new starting point for their day. Now, their time is spent on the most valuable work, while the noise, distraction and repetitive tasks are handled automatically.
Agentic workspace
Agentic workspace is the co-creation space within the Duco platform where users can interact with our agents to build, optimise and manage reconciliation processes. It enables agents to use the same powerful platform that you do in order to propose new rules in our no-code natural rule language (NRL), visualise outcomes, and recommend improvements to match rates.
It’s not just about what they can do, but how they can do it. You remain fully in control: you permission agents in the same way as any other user. They can only access what you let them. Our philosophy is that AI should suggest, and humans validate. Your teams remain in-the-loop throughout to review and approve what the agent proposes.
This powerful, governed automation suite, sitting within the platform you know and love, means that your teams can focus on solving challenges and using data, rather than wrangling it. Add new products, counterparties and other data inputs easily as your business needs it, and without having to think about how many people you’ll need to handle it.
And this isn’t theory: our internal teams are already using agentic workspace to speed up and simplify client builds for one- and two-sided reconciliations, ahead of general availability in the spring.
Let’s take a look at the three key ways in which agentic workspace empowers you to elevate your Operations: build, optimise and manage.
Build: Create processes at the speed of thought
A new business requirement comes rolling in, bringing with it new data that needs checking, reconciling and validating. This requires processes – processes that probably need to be built from scratch, or else iterated on if something suitable already exists.
There’s just one problem: the people who need to change the processes aren’t the ones who can do it. Whether it’s identifying small errors in complex rules, understanding the data patterns to be able to spot an opportunity for better match rates, or uploading and mapping files, it takes time and people with knowledge of the system and the data.
Operations teams have the former covered, but they have to pass this knowledge onto the IT team, who already have a busy development pipeline to work through.
This happens for two reasons:
- It’s (theoretically) a way of ensuring governance remains in place. If all changes have to be documented and go through official channels, there is transparency and accountability. (We say ‘theoretically’ because what often happens is that Ops teams, driven by the need to meet the demands of the business fast, instead spin up risky and opaque manual processes.)
- Legacy hard-coded reconciliation systems are too complicated for anyone other than skilled developers to operate. Process build and iteration requires knowledge of coding.
It’s a way of working that slows progress down to a crawl. Even a simple change – the kind that Duco users can make in half an hour - can take a couple of days on a legacy system. New controls can take days or weeks, depending upon how many other high-priority tasks the IT team is dealing with.
Odds are clients are not building new processes on a daily basis. But, when they do, they need it to be as fast and painless as possible to keep up with the demands of the business.
Duco’s agentic workspace will do just that.
Agentic workspace enables Duco clients to build by simply describing what they want the process to do. Upload files in the chat interface. Refine match rates at the click of a button. Ask questions to get further insight into processes.
Legacy process build versus Duco’s agentic workspace
| Legacy | Agentic workspace |
| Lengthy IT projects | Processes built and validated in minutes |
| In-depth system knowledge required | Simple chat interface |
| Incomplete, inaccurate view of data | Fast pattern recognition and recommendations |
Teams need less ramp time to learn the system. Agentic workspace takes prompts in your natural language and can build full reconciliation processes in a matter of minutes. These processes are still written in our proprietary no-code NRL, meaning you can easily understand and validate if the output is correct.
No more telling IT what you need and then having to wait days or weeks for results. Tell agentic workspace what you need and have a process ready to test in minutes.
Optimise: Start strong, get stronger
Optimising processes is a daily task. It helps improve match rates, identify data issues and adapt your controls to new requirements as they come in. It should be easy, but as mentioned above with process builds, it’s frequently the domain of an already overstretched IT team.
Our platform has been empowering Operations users to maintain, update and optimise their reconciliations for years. No-code rule building enabled the data experts to create processes themselves.
Now, with agentic workspace, we’re giving them a power-up.
Agents can recommend and build rules to improve match rates, identify and potentially address data issues that are causing unnecessary breaks, or seamlessly integrate new inputs. They find and highlight opportunities and propose suggested remedies or improvements for operators to review. If your team approves, the agents take action to optimise processes for the best possible outcomes.
New inputs? Changes to counterparties? All handled with a simple prompt.
Agentic workspace enables your teams to keep up with the pace of change in your business. You get faster time to market, more trustworthy data, and better decisions.
Manage: Accelerate exception management, free up your team
Managing exceptions is the bulk of Operations teams’ work. Breaks are a fact of life, regardless of how good your match rates are. Volumes are so high that even a small percentage of unmatched transactions still equates to a lot of exceptions.
Your team has to assess, prioritise, investigate and rectify them. It’s a task that involves people from across the business.
But before you can do any of that, you have to separate the genuine breaks from the false breaks. The Operations team may start the day with 1,000 breaks - but only three are real errors that need investigation and resolution.
Duco has led the way in exception management workflow, with automated classification, label prediction, and rule-based routing. But, like with creating and optimising processes, agentic workspace builds on those strong foundations to deliver even greater efficiency.
Dedicated agents work around the clock to identify, score and classify exceptions automatically based on your parameters and instructions. They don’t just find the problems - they find why the problem happened and suggest fixes. They can also push breaks to the right people and provide visualisations of the biggest problem areas.
Agentic workspace can do the heavy lifting on exception management, while your team remains firmly in control of the actions they take. Automate the repetitive tasks, like routing breaks to the right desk, while letting agents flag anything that needs human validation, such as making actual changes.
This gives your team an entirely new starting point for their day. Instead of coming in and sifting through the haystacks to find the needles, agents have identified the needles and taken care of the haystack.
Agentic workspace: The foundation of efficient, agile Operations
It’s about to get easier than ever to automate boring, risky, and error-prone manual work in the post-trade lifecycle. Agents from across the Duco platform are ready to get to work for your teams:
- Building and optimising processes.
- Managing exceptions and the day-to-day challenges that crop up as business needs change.
- Helping you keep up with the pace of your business, even as budgets stay flat.
Our internal teams are already using agentic workspace to deliver fast, accurate client outcomes. You can see for it yourself this spring.
Want to know more? Book a demo.
