SmartStream
Imagine the future of financial services
Over four decades, SmartStream has built up a reputation as a technological innovator able to create ground-breaking solutions for the fi nancial services sector. In the past four years, those efforts have not only ramped up, but have been geared more than ever towards customers’ specifi c pain points. Jim Banks explores what innovation means to the company.
hroughout its history, SmartStream has sought to pursue the opportunities that technology opens up for the banking sector. Initially, this took the form of ground-breaking reconciliations solutions – but, over the years, its product portfolio has constantly expanded to help banks revolutionise their back and middle-office functions. Whether it is a solution for any control point in the transaction life cycle, with AI and ML technologies embedded or a cloud or managed services deployment, SmartStream has focused its attention on the capabilities of the latest technologies and, since Haytham Kaddoura took over as CEO, has brought those efforts to bear on the its clients’ needs, rather than pursuing technology for its own sake. Driven by the idea of embedding AI and ML into its solutions – always with a clear idea of how those technologies will benefit its clients – the company is helping banks to completely overhaul key processes, including reconciliations, by understanding their data needs, business objectives and pain points. “As the industry grows, new things feed through from our Innovation Lab into managed services and other solutions going forward,” says Kaddoura. “We are always looking for synergies between our solutions – such as our recent move to link our reference data utility to our reconciliation solutions – because we understand that data is the new gold and it must be solid, clean and reliable.”
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“The pace of data growth means that getting data wrong is increasingly costly,” he adds.
Build a home for innovation The Innovation Lab that Kaddoura refers to is SmartStream’s purpose-built home for innovation, experimentation and investigation of new technologies that could take its solutions to the next level. Opened in Vienna in 2018, as one of Kaddoura’s early moves to breathe new life into the company, it is focused on short-term upgrades to existing solutions, the
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exploration of AI and ML as powerful enablers and also blue-sky thinking about the trends that will shape the financial technology space in the long term. The Lab is headed up by chief innovation officer Andreas Burner, a long-standing member of the SmartStream team who joined the company in 1997, and has more than 20 years’ experience in building financial service solutions for leading international banks. In just a short time, the Lab has played a key role in developing ground-breaking solutions that put AI into core back-office functions. A prime example is SmartStream AIR, an AI-enabled reconciliations solution that is capable of matching any set of structured or unstructured data in seconds rather than weeks or months. The solution autonomously builds and learns matching behaviour, and the company’s customers have been so impressed with the results that, in just two years, the solution has become one of the business’s core engines. Hot on the heels of AIR came Affinity, a cloud-based observational learning tool for data management and discovery, which monitors how individual users work, learns from their behaviour and increases its understanding of how to design the ideal workflow to suit each specific user. Once users have built trust in its capability and once the solution has sufficient data on preferred ways of working, many elements of workflow can be fully automated. “Since Affinity was launched, we have seen big banks getting interested in it,” says Burner. “We showed that it is working and more banks are on board with it. That is challenging because every bank has different data, different workflow and we need to prove to them that it works effectively. “At the moment, we are doing a lot of proof-of- concept projects,” he adds. “We have seen that Affinity can improve performance by 20–25% or more. It is a challenge time-wise for a small innovation team, but big banks are knocking on our door. So, it is a nice problem to have.”
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
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