Many organizations use multiple systems to support the Reconciliation process which makes it difficult to get a unified view of the balance sheet and requires costly manual interventions to solve exceptions. With multiple sources of reconciliation data, there’s no single version of the truth. The manual work required to compare and reconcile data in different systems increases the administrative costs, introduces the risk of errors and slows down exception management. Manual processes and fragmented, siloed departments are the enemy when it comes to increasing operational efficiency.
Siloed reconciliation systems and processes make it difficult for the finance team to track and report on accounting information with accuracy, risking the bank’s compliance with corporate and industry controls.
An additional challenge, is that traditional tools used for reconciliation checks often use only balance-level information. Although this can help companies identify where exceptions exist, they will need however, extensive manual research to identify the transaction that caused the discrepancy and resolve the issue. Integration of both transaction and balance-level data in a single system gives organizations the ‘single version of the truth’.
End-to-End Reconciliation, the Validata way
To increase efficiency and reduce financial and regulatory risk, financial services organisations must deploy technology that streamlines and automates the financial reconciliation activities. By automating the reconciliation lifecycle, clients can improve efficiency, free up resources for more value-added tasks and significantly reduce the time to close daily and period-end reconciliation activities.
The main areas, where clients can achieve significant benefits are the following:
Reduced Financial reconciliation cycle times
Through automation the time it takes to complete reconciliations can be significantly by up to 85%.
Write-offs
Up to now, it was normal to simply write-off losses caused by exceptions than to solve them manually, which resulted in significant financial losses. By improving visibility and accountability relating to exceptions, clients can eliminate somewhere between 75% to 100% of the write-offs previously associated with unresolved exceptions, reducing financial and reputational risk.
Lower audit and professional services fees
By using standardized and automated processes clients can achieve up to a 25% reduction in audit costs.
The tool can extract data from both General Ledger (GL) and core banking system and provide true end-to-end financial reconciliation, enabling you to gain a single, unified governance solution, maintain visibility and management control across all reconciliation activities, and transform balance sheet reconciliations from a standalone spreadsheet-bound activity that causes delays in reporting, into a streamlined process that improves control, reduces financial risk, and assists management to accelerate the reconciliation process.
By choosing Validata for true end-to-end reconciliation you get:
- Support for the full range of financial instruments (wires, checks, cards, ACH, Swift, cash) as well as securities, inter-company transactions and trades – all in a single platform
- Full automated end-to-end reconciliation process from loading and enhancing data to solving exceptions
- Integration of both balance-level and transaction-level data to increase visibility of what has caused exceptions
- Standardized processes for transparency and visibility across all asset types and scenarios
- Enterprise-wide governance and control
Centralising reconciliation processes is the key to implement effective financial controls across the organisation in a consistent, timely and predictable manner.
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