The Reconciliation Maturity Model: Your best practice guide to recon excellence
By James Maxfield, Chief Product Officer.
If you’ve ever spent a lot of time within middle and back office, as I have, you’ll know that reconciliations and control is a key part of what people in Operations do.
It’s a very critical task in terms of ensuring that data is correct, trades and positions are booked correctly, representations of customer business are accurate internally and match what the customer sees outside the firm.
Financial reconciliation: From manual to mastery
An organisation’s journey around reconciliation and control often starts quite small. They have a business or a type of activity that they need to ensure that they’ve got data integrity around. Stage 1 of reconciliation maturity is often a manual four eyes check. For example, an individual has two screens they have to look at.
It could even be a piece of paper with a highlighter pen!
Or it could be something a bit more robust, such as an Excel spreadsheet where they’re performing lookups and controls and matches. That is where a lot of rudimentary controls start.
Ultimately, though, as the expectations of stakeholders change and increase, you need to start to rethink that environment. Whereas a spreadsheet may well be fit for purpose where you have 10 transactions, it’s very clearly not fit for purpose where you have a million.
One of the key benefits of ultimately reaching maturity in your reconciliation model is really the efficiency and scale that it gives you. You’ll see this when new businesses come on board, when new products are traded, when new entities are opened or new markets extended into.
Advancing your reconciliation technology and practices enables you to keep on top of growing volumes, elevated volatility, increasing market complexity and more prescriptive demands around data quality from regulators.
Being able to fold all of that control activity easily and safely into a robust, efficient, scalable business model saves a tonne of time. It’s also extremely efficient in terms of being able to get into market much more quickly than your competitors.
Your guide to reaching accurate, efficient reconciliation
Here at Duco, we’ve been deploying cloud-native innovative control solutions for more than a decade to the capital markets industry. We have a breadth of over 200 customers now and our experiences working with these customers has enabled us to get a really good handle on what best practice and what good looks like.
We’ve packed all our insights and experience up into the Reconciliation Maturity Model, a guide that meets the high industry demand for best practice. You can use it to benchmark your firm, get actionable steps on advancing up the maturity scale and discover the cost and efficiency gains waiting for you when you do.
Download it below to get started on your journey to reconciliation excellence.
