SmartStream Technologies, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management specialist, today announced that Bank Espirito Santo Angola (BESA), part of the Portuguese Bank Espirito Santo (BES) group, has selected TLM Corona for cash and intraday reconciliations.
BESA is an award-winning bank delivering financial products and services to the Angolan market, with a focus on private and corporate clients. The bank has built a strong reputation for providing banking services to firms operating in Angola, one of the fastest growing economies in Africa.
Payments reconciliations and positions were being managed using basic tools and as transaction volumes continued to rise they created a significant processing bottleneck. This led Banco Espirito Santo Angola to examine solutions that could reduce risk and cost while providing greater control and scalability to BESA's operations.
The BES Group was familiar with SmartStream's reconciliation capabilities as it already used the TLM Corona solution in Portugal. After a review of BESA's requirements, it selected TLM Corona to automate the bank's cash and intraday reconciliations, cash positions, and investigations.
Katila Santos, Operations Manager at Bank Espirito Santo Angola, explained: "With a highly successful business we were seeing a large increase in transaction volumes and our existing tools to support reconciliations were starting to cause processing problems. We pride ourselves on providing the best possible service to customers and so looked for a solution that could provide greater automation and scalability while also delivering improved visibility into our cash positions. By implementing TLM Corona we can significantly improve risk control and ensure our back office is more efficient enabling us to reduce operational costs. It will also support improved customer service as we can quickly see where exceptions have occurred and fix the issue to ensure the correct payments are made."
Christian Schiebl, Executive Vice President, SmartStream Technologies, commented: "I am delighted that BES has selected SmartStream to deliver greater automation to its rapidly expanding Angolan operations. SmartStream and BES have built a strong relationship and this latest announcement is testament to the high quality work we have done within its Portuguese operation. BESA is a successful bank delivering services in a dynamic market and they recognised that manual processes could no longer support their rapid business growth. With TLM Corona providing high automated match rates and investigation tools into failed transactions, BESA can reduce its risk and costs while also supporting improvements in customer service."