Taking control of your reconciliations: data, aggregation, validation and enrichment

Data ingestion and validation 

For any reconciliation to operate effectively it must be provided with readable and complete data. One of the key challenges financial institutions continue to face is around aggregating, validating, and enriching data from various external sources into the reconciliation process, particularly PDF documents. Typically, it is easy to obtain data from internal systems. However, the process of ensuring that complete data is available for the reconciliation is more challenging than the reconciliation itself. 

Xceptor Reconciliations helps financial institutions to ingest, aggregate and validate structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and document types into a structured form, by a customizable set of smart business rules, powered by our unique combination of OCR and NLP capabilities. Xceptor provides a highly intuitive user interface that is designed to require minimal human intervention, which significantly reduces costs and improves efficiency, control, and accountability. Xceptor ingests data from various sources and formats, including PDF, Excel/CSV, Xml, SWIFT, SQL, email, and ODBC.

There is little point in conducting a reconciliation where the accuracy and integrity of the source data cannot be ascertained and demonstrated. Validating the data before it arrives in the reconciliation system is key to identifying breaches of data integrity e.g., duplicate data, missing and wrong data files.

Xceptor Reconciliations allows financial institutions to achieve data integrity, by automatically ingesting and validating data efficiency, and focusing on the key breaks identified during the reconciliation process. 

Data ingestion key features: 

• An intuitive user interface to extract data from distinct types of PDF documents  
• NLP capabilities to extract data from documents with varying formats 
• Pre-defined data quality and validation rules to highlight missing fields 
• Enrichment rules to filter out noise data, perform complex calculations and bring data from multiple static or reference data systems 
• Centralized electronic data collection, aggregation, and normalization from multiple sources and the ability to deal with multiple file types 
• Immediate transaction amendment capability to add new records or update existing records with narrative carried forward from previous version 

Accelerate your reconciliations process

One of the key benefits of Xceptor is that firms can set up traditional offline reconciliations very quickly. It can take five to ten minutes for simple reconciliations, like positions reconciliations, that are two-sided and require minimal data transformation. 

Unlike some traditional reconciliation tools, business users can easily configure the rules of the reconciliation (including match rules, comparison rules, and calculated fields). Gone are the days when IT needed to code in the rules of your reconciliation. However, Xceptor still supports a governance and administration layer that allows IT governance over any changes to a reconciliation, or the “go-live” of a reconciliation. This provides flexibility for business users to build reconciliations without having to go to IT, but still allows IT to oversee certain aspects of the process, such as change management and overlap analysis, before pushing new reconciliations into production.

Exception management: non-standard reconciliations  

A common challenge for our clients stems from the need to configure and run reconciliations that are not aimed at reconciling financial data.  Examples include static data for financial instruments that need to be contrasted with data aggregators, regulatory reporting data matching and reconciliation, and reconciling data after a system migration. 

Xceptor Reconciliations offers a highly configurable solution with no predefined schemas to adhere to.  Our clients decide which data they want to match and compare as part of each reconciliation.  There is complete flexibility in the number and type of fields that can be used, in contrast to the restrictive nature of other providers whose approach is to try to bucket reconciliations as cash or stock.   

Summary

The quality and availability of the right data is key to a smooth reconciliation process. Xceptor Reconciliations makes it easy to take control of your data, ensuring accuracy from the outset, and paving the way for frictionless reconciliations.

Coming soon: look out for the next blog in our T+1 series, entitled ‘T+1 Slipstream’, where we highlight the potential pain points to be aware of when preparing for T+1.