SunGard Automates the Management of Reconciliation Services

SunGard has released a new solution, IntelliMatch Enterprise Management Studio, which allows financial institutions to monitor their reconciliation services and provides analytics to detect unexpected issues.

As Richard Chapman, director of product management for IntelliMatch Operational Control (a reconciliations solutions provider within SunGard), explains, the solution does not actually do any reconciliation, but it “manages the reconciliation landscape.”

“You’ve got this environment within financial institutions where instead of having one or two pockets of reconciliation, you have reconciliation everywhere…It’s really exploded, and it’s moved intraday and real-time as well. It’s become hard to manage,“ says Chapman.

As reconciliation needs have grown, firms have turned to centralized platforms to process these reconciliations. While automation reduces costs and risk in this space, Chapman believes that this centralization only shifts the problem up to the service level.

“How do you make sure that automation continues to be effective over time, and how do you manage the overall setup and configuration and administration of the whole landscape of automation that you’ve created?” asks Chapman.

“You’ve taken on this responsibility as a firm to manage all these things and realized, a little bit late in the game, that the way that you manage it actually is very manual,” adds Jennifer Hanes, executive vice president of product strategy for SunGard’s Ambit Corporate Banking solution suite (which IntelliMatch falls under).

To improve this management of reconciliation services, IntelliMatch’s solution creates an inventory of all of a firm’s reconciliations, monitors the inventory in real-time, and provides analytics to determine when there is a mismatch between the expected and actual results.

“And by doing that, it creates a time window where you’ve gone beyond what you’ve expect to normally deliver, but you haven’t yet had a service breach,” says Chapman. “So they can now proactively repair issues before they become a service-level issue.”

Chapman and Hanes say the solution is targeted for the larger Tier 1 banks, but they expect that, over time, smaller institutions will also need to find a way to manage their reconciliations.