The Allure of AI in Reconciliation: Does AI Solve Recon Automation?

This is the first article in our series on AI Reconciliation! Subscribe for the rest of the series!

Banks are pouring billions into AI, yet up to 80% of a data scientist’s time is spent just preparing data (more on that later—either way, it’s a lot of time).

This contrast underscores the messy reality behind the AI hype in financial operations.

Reconciliation, a critical process in finance, is often touted as ripe for AI and machine learning (ML) transformation. The promises are grand: AI will automate matching, eliminate...

The Hidden Costs of Manual Reconciliation in Financial Services

Manual reconciliation has been the go-to method in financial services for decades. But as transaction volumes surge and markets evolve, the cracks in these traditional processes are becoming impossible to ignore. Enterprise reconciliation tools from Sungaurd and Smartstream promise to automate these processes but are themselves complex. What happens? On edge cases, institutions revert to manual reconciliations (using Excel, for example). So we return to the original problem: financial institutions relying on manual methods to reconcile accounts, trades, and settlements face hidden costs that can drag down both efficiency and...