11,000
transactions handled each month
97.56%
accuracy achieved
20
Full Time Employees freed-up
A leading global Investment Bank accelerated its middle office by automating the trade execution and settlement for its clients – eliminating manual review to focus on client experience.
Bloated middle-office operations constrained by unstructured data
As a major custodian, the bank received thousands of transaction instructions in the form of Custody Faxes from its clients every month. For larger clients, these instructions would be sent electronically, but for the longtail of smaller firms – data was unstructured and unpredictable.
An army of operations analysts were required to manually sort, review and process these documents. They were under constant pressure to meet fluctuating demand while maintaining strict accuracy requirements. The status quo limited straight-through processing to only 40% of documents, resulting in most settlements being managed manually.
In order to meet their established cost reduction targets, scaling automation up to 90% of cash transactions was crucial.
Reusing pre-packaged building blocks enabled a working solution in only 5 days with 50 samples
The bank partnered with Instabase’s team to quickly configure a new solution on the platform, making use of existing building blocks to drive rapid delivery. This included building blocks for digitizing the data, classifying the documents, extracting the key transaction fields, and validating the accuracy. Once extracted, the data could be validated for accuracy using logical constraints and data lookups from existing systems.
Given the bank already had incumbent vertical systems, it was essential that any automation would be able to be applied easily alongside the existing stack. As such, the teams also included a building block to map the data to the schema that the existing settlement system was ready to accept – enabling true end-to-end automation.
Setting a foundation to scale the business without scaling costs
The automated solution enabled the bank to move to a data-first process, with automated processing rising from 40% to over 95%. Over 11,000 transactions are now able to be handled every single month in this way, free-ing up 20 Full Time Employees to better serve their customers.