SmartStream, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management specialist, today announced the launch of a new General Ledger (GL) account reconciliation solution for enterprises, bringing unparalleled levels of visibility and control whilst shortening the financial close process.

Many large organisations are looking at ways to further automate the management of their financial close by eradicating the challenges of highly manual and decentralised processes. In particular, there is a need to accelerate the flow of consolidated, verified information, to improve operational efficiency and to eliminate the risk of errors leading to restatement.

Based on the industry-leading and award winning TLM Reconciliations-Premium product, the new TLM Account Reconciliation solution replaces manual and fragmented processes with a fully automated, workflow-based approach. It removes the re-keying of data that presents potential for human error, increases cost and lacks proper operational controls demanded by regulatory authorities.

As a result, SmartStream's TLM Account Reconciliation solution creates a unified, automated platform for account reconciliation and balance sheet substantiation that provides enhanced transparency to financial controllers. It delivers significant cost reductions through the retirement of multiple legacy systems and spreadsheets, while also reducing the resources required to perform the financial close in a shorter period of time.

At a time when time to market and total cost of ownership (TCO) are critical, SmartStream is partnering with global business process and technology management specialist Genpact to offer the new solution on a comprehensive business process as a service (BPaaS) basis. Genpact has a unique heritage, beginning as a business unit with GE that has contributed to its extensive understanding of the account sign-off and financial close process. This insight has enabled Genpact to manage over 3,000 back office processes fs for more than 400 clients globally, making it a global leader in finance and accounting (F&A) process management including order-to-cash and record-to-report operations.

Genpact is ideally placed to offer the new solution to organisations, having used TLM reconciliations for many years to manage its own account close processes. The firm is working with SmartStream to configure the new account reconciliations solution and it will act as the preferred implementation partner, as well as offer the solution as BPaaS for enterprises around the world.

"Genpact is wrapping its expertise in streamlining end-to-end F&A processes around a flexible technology platform to make our clients' financial closing operations even more effective," said 'Tiger' Tyagarajan, COO, Genpact. "This partnership with SmartStream will strengthen our BPaaS offerings, enabling us to deliver best-in-class processes that are quick to implement and require little upfront investment."

Philippe Chambadal, CEO, SmartStream, "Genpact has a deep understanding of the account reconciliation and GL requirements of corporates, while SmartStream has the core reconciliation expertise and a solution that manages billions of transactions for financial services firms globally. By collaborating we can offer the combined skills and knowledge to deliver significant efficiencies to corporates who currently struggle with their financial close processes. The new solution, whether delivered on premise or as a BPaaS offering will deliver more controlled, efficient and transparent account reconciliation processing."