The State Bank of India (SBI) has implemented a reconciliations tool supplied by SmartStream Technologies in its Foreign (or Forex) Department in Kolkata.
Smartsream says SBI – the largest bank in India, with more than 9,000 branches and over 200,000
employees – wanted to improve and fully automate the reconciliation process for its Nostro and worldwide foreign exchange payment activities.
With a large volume of inter-branch and inter-bank transactions, it was faced with the task of managing the reconciliation of a multitude of disparate transaction datafeeds, from both manual and electronic sources.
With the objective of replacing its in-house solution, the bank embarked on PROJECT ELENOR (Electronic Nostro Reconciliation). SBI evaluated a number of reconciliation solutions and providers over the period of a year. In the end, SmartStream says it was chosen because of its ability to accommodate the bank’s requirements scalability and functionality, plus its local implementation and support record – notably the implementation of a solution at Standard Chartered Bank in Chennai.
SmartStream Reconciliations has been installed at the bank in Kolkata to deliver a single, real-time, integrated reconciliations platform. The solution has already delivered significant improvements in STP rates and operational efficiencies. SmartStream and SBI worked together to implement best
practices
from
the
market place and this business process re-engineering has placed SBI in a leading position in Asia Pacific.
Over 12,000 separate records are received by SBI daily from domestic branches and foreign offices for reconciliation. The system delivers the most comprehensive matching rules available on the market and provides the ability to handle discrepancies in references effectively and efficiently. SBI is using SmartStream’s integrated Investigations functionality to great benefit by sending exceptions back to source for resolution. Another tangible
benefit
of
the system is that the cycle times of the reconciliation process have been drastically reduced. In some cases from once a week or once a fortnight to real time.
Joyce Chan, Vice President, Operations for SmartStream Technologies commented:
“SBI
wanted a proven solution to fully automate their reconciliation and investigations process. They needed a solution that can cope with high transaction volumes and which is able to manage many different data sources. SmartStream Technologies’ competence in these areas made it the obvious choice.”
Andrew Raymond, Regional Director for SmartStream Technologies Asia Pacific added: “We are delighted by the great project success at SBI and we look forward to offering similar solutions to other players in the market. The installation of the SmartStream Reconciliations solution underlines our ability to deliver solutions of any scale on time and on budget, anywhere in the world. The successful implementation of the solution was due in a large part to SmartStream and SBI’s strong working relationship.”