Case Study - Case Study: New Generation Online Bank

Company profile

The Client is an online bank – a new generation banking institution that strives to make a difference through technology. Unlike traditional banks with their networks of physical branches, the Client is agile, innovative, and customer-centric. It seeks to equip its growing customer base with a wide range of modern online tools for effortless and hassle-free finance management.

Challenges

Almost all banks today are bound to deal with reconciling multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies and the Client is no exception. Given the wide variety of banking products and sophisticated financial instruments such as securities, equity trades and positions, the reconciliation workload grew increasingly complex and time consuming. Manual reconciliation of the books with Excel spreadsheets and custom-built Access tools only worked as a temporary solution for the Client’s auditable reconciliation process. Precision, speed, and visibility in the accounting practices are of critical importance in such a highly transactional and heavily regulated environment.

The Client was witnessing a rapid growth, where process automation, scalability, and stricter internal controls surfaced as primary objectives. As a sensitive daily routine, the verification of incoming/outgoing debit and credit card operations required optimization and closer alignment with the bank’s high financial security standards. However, rigorous fraud detection and addressing potential process flaws involved hiring additional staff. Eventually, a mature and technology oriented approach was embraced.

Solution

The management team of the bank was well aware that timely error identification and resolution would ultimately prevent financial losses, which led to ReconArt’s selection out of several reconciliation vendors assessed. Rapid deployment, user friendly interface, and above all streamlined reconciliation process were among the top criteria behind our customer’s decision.

Within only a few weeks of implementation time, ReconArt™ was live, enabling end-users across the organization to proactively investigate items without the burdensome manual data manipulation, transactional matching and reporting. This has allowed the Client’s team, by their own feedback, to shift their focus from matching records to solving problems. The Client appreciated ReconArt’s responsiveness concerning support and training, both on-site and remote.

Results & Benefits

The combined gains for the Client from the ReconArt™ solution deployment include:

• Automation of import and matching operations
• Elimination of manual and semi-manual spreadsheet-based processes
• Capacity to deal with large transactional amounts
• Multiple import file format supported
• Immediate identification of exceptions, fraud items and their related risk
• An intuitive set up of reconciliation rules granting independence and self-sufficiency
• Enhanced operational efficiency
• No need to on-board additional staff

As a result of the sustained user confidence, the Client has embarked on the introduction of a new process – real time credit transfers within the EU, 24/7 and with no amount limits. That calls for system calibration to switch to daily, even hourly reconciliation of transaction volumes which are projected to exceed 50 thousand per day. The urge to innovate and the excellent command of the ReconArt software functionalities encouraged the Client to implement the process themselves.