Introduction
Aquila’s Automated Securities Reconciliation (SR) modules allows the reconciling of securities holdings or trades in a timely and accurate manner. It has been designed to be volume sensitive to enable institutions to respond to the organic growth of their institution as well as market demands. Benefits include:
- Reduced manual processes
- Improved audit and control
- Improved accuracy
- Improved time cycles
- Reduced risk
- Fully scalable
- Reduced cost
- Improved compliance
- Enhanced by Artificial Intelligence
Integrated solution
SR provides a high performance, resilient and fully scalable processing solution. Apart from integrating to proprietary systems, off the shelf adapters are also provided for many popular back office solutions. Aquila is also available as a managed cloud solution.
With greater visibility into the reconciliations processing, SR allows institutions to be more proactive when exceptions occur in the transaction lifecycle. Standard and configurable extraction routines allow rapid deployment providing an excellent and timely return on investment. Industry standard formats such as SWIFT can be processed as well as spreadsheets and other proprietary data.
Reconciliation formatting flexibility
SR is typically configured for matching SWIFT securities positional and trade statements against the details held in the back office system. Information can be received in SWIFT FIN format (MT535, MT536 and MT537), the new XML standards for funds or any other proprietary format.
Positional Reconciliation
Aquila’s positional reconciliation module has been designed to automate the complete reconciliation lifecycle of your institution. Every aspect of the trading and settlement lifecycle for any security is supported within Aquila’s integrated solution.
SR starts automatic matching on receipt of new statements for a specific depository account and date. This automatically triggers the appropriate data extract from the back office system and then initiated the matching process.
In order to maximise the effectiveness of the reconciliation, Aquila automatically adjusts the back office extraction depending on whether the ‘traded’ or ‘settled’ position is required.
The system can also include the MT537 statement of pending transactions in order to better synchronise the information that needs to be reconciled.
Transactional Reconciliation
MT536 statements of transactions are linked to individual trades in the back office, providing a granular reconciliation at the trade level.
SR extracts these items, either at the end of day or intraday as required and the back office trades are matched against the MT536 trades automatically.
Balance Proofing
Balance proofing compares the sum of unmatched trades or match differences of common securities against the outstanding position of the associated security on the last chronological MT535 positional statement.
Matching Rules
Matching rules are configurable by the users and are automatically applied at either a global or account level. Maintaining these rules ensures consistently high levels of matching that minimises the need for manual matching activities. The standard matching rules include:
- ISIN Matching • ISIN & Narrative Details • Alternate Details
Referral Management
SR users have the ability to electronically refer an item to a specific individual or department with notes. Users assigned to answer referrals can view them electronically, add additional notes, set the query status to answered, optionally refer items to another department or propose a matching scenario with other outstanding items.
External Queries
The ability to select individual statement entries, and automatically format an external query message (via SWIFT MT595) to the counterparty that sent the original statement is provided. Answers received (e.g. MT596) are automatically linked to the original query.
Compliance, User Security & Audit
User profile and static data changes are managed under dual control. Users can be allocated to, or prevented from performing specific functions and processes. Comprehensive audit logs of all changes are available for the appropriate staff.
- Configurable compliance & audit control
- User profile management
- Static data management
- Dual control (4 eyes)
- User limits
- Audit & message change audit
All data changes are date and time stamped. All processing events (system and user) are logged on the audit trails and attached to each message.
Key Features
Positional reconciliation using: MT535, MT537
Transactional reconciliation using: MT536 and:
- Balance Proofing
- Referral Management
- Exception Processing
- Matching Rules
- Compliance, User Security and Audit
- Notifications
