Innovation Journal - Cognizant

RETHINK - TRADE RECONCILIATION HUB
I was part of a 20 person team that worked for one of the biggest
multinational banking corporations, with the key responsibility of
financial reconciliation. Reconciliation refers to a process that
compares two sets of records of financial transactions to make sure
that they are in agreement. We would often have meetings with top
managers to discuss the technicalities of the reconciliation work.
One day, the client’s lead project manager shared some interesting
facts; according to the AITE research, IT spending in the global
reconciliation market would reach $520 million by 2014.¹ The financial
reconciliation industry is growing at around 20% every year, driven by
globalization of financial markets and high-speed networks, which
h a v e i n c re a s e d g l o b a l fi n a n c i a l a c t i v i t y a n d fi n a n c i a l
transactions,thereby causing huge data volumes, stressing
performance, and business complexity that was challenging accuracy.
Added to this, changing market conditions were calling for cost-saving
options.
Meanwhile, the team relied on workaround solutions, as every
department, line of business and customer was requesting a special
requirement that could not be addressed by the existing systems. As a
result, the team was stuck with manually processing reconciliations,
given few affordable solutions existed in the trading world.
My project manager at Cognizant saw this situation as an opportunity.
“How might we build a one-stop solution for trade reconciliation
between the front office, middle office and general ledger that delivers
a fully automated reconciliation management capability, including data
acquisition, enrichment, user workflow, reporting and daily/month-end
AITE Group predicts IT spending in global reconciliations
market to reach USD 520 million by 2014
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520
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2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
trade control requirements?” he asked. He pointed out that our
customers are saddled with the following problems:
Complex, heterogeneous environments.
Poorly defined or badly implemented systems integration.
Expensive and proprietary vendor solutions or complex inflexible inhouse
solutions.
Huge risk from the lack of a reconciliation solution.
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