Reconciliation. Big yawn, right?

Not exactly – not if improved performance and happier clients are your goal.

I admit, reconciliation hardly comes across as the sexiest of subjects. And if you’re talking about going through lots of spreadsheets, manually ticking figures off against each other then I quite agree. Wouldn’t we all prefer to be doing something else?

Yet done right, reconciliation is crucial to both your front office success, and clients’ satisfaction – two pretty worthwhile areas of focus!

Why?

Making a good impression

For one, clients are demanding more and better access to relevant data.

Sophisticated client reporting in particular has become an essential part of the customer experience – as seen with the emergence of interactive portals. Attracting new clients and retaining existing ones increasingly depends on cutting edge technology that allows you to service them how they want to be serviced.

We all now expect access to our financial account information on any device, whenever and wherever we are. And we certainly expect that information to be accurate and up-to-date.

Who wants to have to go back to their clients to tell them their account details are wrong, or that you have to restate the investment performance because of some data errors? Hardly a recipe for satisfied customers.

So before you let your clients see that data it has to be cleaned and checked. And that means properly reconciled.

More informed decisions

Timely, accurate, reconciled data is also vital to the front office.

What would happen if your traders are acting on outdated or inaccurate cash balances, trades and positions? Say they had more cash than they thought, and so missed a trading opportunity and underperformed their benchmark? Or that a position is mis-valued and they failed to hedge the exposure properly?

Reconciliation is too important to be left to error-prone and time-consuming manual processes, or an inflexible legacy system.

So why not sharpen your competitive edge?

Adopting seamless, automated, exception-based processes, with tools that flag breaks and help fix them quickly, offers a quick yet significant ROI. Your performance success and client service capabilities deserve no less.

Check out these 10 steps to happier clients and better performance in our white paper “Best Practices in Reconciliation”.

Daniel Eriksson joined Advent in 2001 and is Vice President of Solutions Management and Consulting in EMEA. Daniel has held several senior roles supporting the extensive business growth of Advent in the region, and has extensive knowledge about trends and requirements within the fin-tech industry.