SmartStream
Build a bridge to the cloud
The cloud is becoming a key enabler of banks’ digital transformation initiatives as they move away from on-premise data centres to control costs and build agility into their service offerings. At SmartStream, cloud-enabled solutions are the norm and they are the basis for its rapidly growing managed services division. Jim Banks looks at what is fuelling that growth and how the company is developing its managed services offering.
inancial transaction life cycle management solutions provider SmartStream exists to support financial institutions, and their treasuries and key stakeholders with the delivery of real-time, AI-enabled and cloud-based post-trade processing solutions across the full financial transaction life cycle. Its value proposition relies on cloud-native solutions, which its management foresaw would be vital for the banking industry.
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In an increasingly competitive market, large banks are looking to become agile and move away from their legacy core banking systems to compete with the many fintechs and challenger banks that are unencumbered by such monolithic systems. Furthermore, they are trying to cut back on the cost of running their own data centres to become, in one big transformative leap, more flexible and more efficient. Hence the move towards public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. From there, it is a short step to hand over key processes to a trusted partner to run on their own technology stack. The cloud is inevitable and it is the vital stepping stone towards signing up to a more comprehensive managed services offering. “I go to a bank and it will be expressing an interest in managed services because it is trying to get away from running its own data centres,” says Nick Smith, SmartStream’s executive vice-president of managed services. “Or it may know that the servers it is using are approaching end of life and it is wondering why it should replace them when the cloud is out there. Cloud gives scalability and is cost-effective, so everyone is jumping on board.”
“In our managed services division, we can provide better BPO because it is based on our solutions, on more automation and AI,” adds Andreas Burner, chief innovation officer at SmartStream. “It is a real success story for the managed services team and the solutions in the portfolio. The wheels started spinning two years ago, and more and more banks are being onboarded
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now. Benchmarks show how we could improve the business of big banks with Nick’s team, which gives them a lot of trust.”
Cloud-based and cost-effective SmartStream’s managed services brings many of its market-leading solutions to its banking customers in a scalable, reliable, secure and cost-effective way. A key element of that portfolio is SmartStream AIR, the company’s AI-enabled reconciliation platform, which can match any structured or unstructured data sets in seconds rather than weeks.
A relatively new feature to join the managed services cloud family is Affinity, an observational learning solution driven by ML, which can improve operational data management and data quality by learning how individual users work with the portfolio of solutions and automate the optimisation of their workflow. Alongside powerful, cloud-enabled tools for reconciliations, corporate actions processing, collateral management, cash and liquidity management, fees and expense management, and reference data, clients can also access the data lake functionality. Data lakes act as centralised repositories in which clients can store their structured and unstructured data. Once that data has been gathered, banks can mine it to enable enhanced regulatory reporting and gain deeper insights from the vast volume of data they collect during processes such as reconciliation. Having these data lakes as part of the managed services portfolio allows clients to ramp up the use of the company’s comprehensive suite of cloud-based solutions to handle any kind of query or reporting requirement without any additional configuration. “All products, the latest addition being cash management, sit in managed services and we have clients up and running for all of them,” Smith explains, noting that the company was an early adopter of cloud services way back in 2006.
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
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