Electra Information Systems, Inc. (“Electra”), a leading provider of award-winning post-trade solutions for the buy-side investment management industry, has added new capabilities to its Electra Reconciliation platform to enable firms to expedite investigations by quickly identifying the root causes of trade breaks or exceptions.
Electra Reconciliation 6.0 incorporates intelligent integration of research data, machine learning, and a proprietary matching algorithm to give operations professionals faster root-cause analysis, improve productivity, and enable management to gain real-time insight into its current positions.
Investment managers’ operations teams spend an excessive amount of time investigating exceptions. Often, multiple departments across the middle and back offices participate in the effort, leading to inefficiencies and high error rates, as well as increased transaction costs and operational risk. Typical of silo-based reconciliation environments, staff must access emails, spreadsheets and external data sources to investigate breaks outside of the firm’s core reconciliation platform, with much of the same work repeated across different teams.
Electra Reconciliation 6.0 expands upon its patented intelligent integration of cash, positions and transactions to include research data – which is comprised of failed trades, corporate actions, securities lending and collateral – into the investigation process. The system provides access to a research data repository that serves as a single point of reference to help accelerate investigations, reduce manual intervention and errors, and foster cross-functional collaboration and transparency throughout post-trade operations.
Electra Reconciliation 6.0 also uses machine learning (ML) for automatic source data mapping, which will recognize behavior patterns on external events and third-party data to seamlessly integrate these patterns into the investigation workflow in a future release. By incorporating research data and promoting cross-functional collaboration, Electra Reconciliation efficiently presents information to users and helps prevent duplicate effort. The new release also includes a proprietary, semantic-based fuzzy matching algorithm to address common security ID issues using descriptions, as well as expands upon the Electra Data catalog to include an extensive library of research reports.
John Landry, CEO of Electra, said: “Identifying exceptions is easy, but investigating their root causes is where the real work begins. One failed trade can impact multiple post-trade functions, potentially reaching a NAV (net asset value), corporate action, position or cash balance. With increased margin compression and greater competition, investment managers can no longer tolerate high error rates and redundancy in the investigations process due to the same work being performed across different reconciliation solutions and outside sources. They must eliminate investigation silos which impose greater risk as product complexity and transaction volumes increase. Electra Reconciliation 6.0 raises the bar for improving efficiency and transparency across the entire investigations process, and across the firm.”
Electra Reconciliation helps asset managers and service providers improve efficiency, accuracy and transparency across reconciliation, exception management and the entire post-trade process. Designed specifically for the investment management industry, the system’s patented, intelligent workflow and integration combined with a comprehensive data catalog enables firms to focus valuable time and resources on strengthening competitive differentiation and driving business growth. Electra Reconciliation is delivered as installed software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a Managed Service.