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Case study

The challenge

A global investment bank needed to overhaul its intersystem reconciliation process and control standards to meet stringent new regulatory requirements and reduce the time to onboard new controls. The bank’s in-house legacy tool for intersystem controls extracted data from 4,000 sources and was often inconsistent, duplicative and unreliable. In addition, the platform’s hardware and software were nearing end of life, and the platform itself was neither optimized to meet new regulatory mandates nor reconcile data in real time. The bank turned to Cognizant, its long-time capital markets platform partner and the 1,500-strong team at our Reconciliation Center of Excellence for a modern solution that would help overcome its challenges.

Our approach

Having worked with the bank for over a decade, we are extremely familiar with the existing intersystem reconciliation platform and its limitations. Based on our expertise in reconciliations, we compared the top reconciliation platform providers on eight key parameters: end-of-life risk, operation risk reduction, performance and volume capacity, intraday capability, time to market, migration costs, operating costs and intersystem functionality.

We helped the bank identify the best-in-class platform, selecting Gresham’s Clareti Transaction Control (CTC) for its flexibility, innovative technology and real-time capabilities. Cognizant implemented the CTC platform in eight weeks and worked closely with Gresham to improve the bank’s control environment. We built nearly 500 new controls and reconciliations, and deployed the enterprise-wide solution across geographies, asset classes and business units. To ensure that mission-critical data was complete, accurate and consistent, we designed the platform to meet all key regulatory requirements for risk and data management.

Partnership paves the way for robust reconciliation solution

The rapid migration from a series of point-to-point legacy solutions to a holistic, modern solution helped the bank improve its data integrity while also ensuring regulatory compliance and enhancing its risk profile and visibility. Now, the bank’s users can enable 70 new controls per month instead of the five to 10 controls possible prior to implementation, saving the bank $8.6 million and reducing the cost per control by nearly half. At the same time, the quality of reconciliations improved significantly. The solution eliminated several manual processes, optimized operations by 60 percent and improved the age profile by 70 percent while enabling the bank to handle all transactions using the centralized system. Moreover, Cognizant’s partnership with Gresham enables us to provide ongoing managed services that address the bank’s complete reconciliations needs—from operations to technology.

$8.6 million

saved in operational costs

50%

reduction in the cost per control

~500

new controls built