Improving Match Rates for Millions of Transactions

This Precisely customer is one of the largest financial services institutions in the United States with nearly 7,000 bank branches and 4,000 consumer finance and mortgage offices nationwide. In addition to offering standard personal and small business banking services, it leads the industry in mortgage services, small business lending, online brokerage and mutual funds.  Each day, the institution receives several million transactions from bank systems across the country. This transaction processing, representing various lines of business, have been processed through different applications and ultimately reconciled to a single general ledger.

The institution’s IT department managed the reconciliation systems and administered the change request process for both low impact (user interface) and high impact (database and application maintenance) changes. In this environment, the institution faced multiple challenges:

• Validation timing: The files containing transactions did not always arrive on time, which triggered validation issues
• Labor-intensive discrepancies: Data discrepancies led to high rates of partial or suspect matches, resulting in lost productivity
• Mismatched applications: Depending on the line of business or location, work groups used different systems to reconcile transactions
• Time-consuming processes: Users spent significant time validating and researching matches, creating correspondences and conducting cross-system corrections
• Lack of scalability: To accommodate growth, the institution needed the ability to add new lines of business while utilizing current resources and minimizing costs

In this environment, with multiple systems supporting a mix of manual and automated transaction processing to reconcile transactions, the customer achieved an average match rate of less than 50%. Improving its match rates was mission critical to the company’s goals in meeting daily, weekly, and month-end reports that accounted for millions of transactions.

Read more about how this leading financial services company tackled transaction processing for validation timing, labor-intensive discrepancies, mismatched applications and more.