Overview
A Tier 1 investment manager with a 400-person cross-region securities operations team deployed Smart Agents to address unsustainable manual break triage volumes and enable scalable automation across its total equity and securities reconciliations function.
Challenge
The investment manager’s cross-region operations team was buried in manual break triage, with rising transaction volumes and T+1 settlement pressure compounding the workload. Limited offshore scaling capacity meant the team had no viable path to absorb volume growth without adding headcount. The combination of manual investigation processes, fragmented data, and geographic operational constraints was creating systemic risk to settlement SLAs and operational resilience.
Solution
The investment manager implemented Smart Agents to automate break detection, investigation, and resolution across its total equity and securities reconciliations estate. Smart Agents leverage Smartstream’s proprietary reconciliation intelligence and the firm’s own institutional knowledge to triage and resolve exceptions autonomously, reducing dependence on offshore headcount scaling while maintaining full regulatory auditability. Human-in-the-loop controls ensure oversight is retained for complex or high-value cases, in line with the firm’s governance requirements.
Benefits
The deployment achieved a 50% automation rate in Year 1, enabling the operations team to absorb rising volumes without proportionate headcount growth and materially reducing T+1 settlement exposure. Manual break triage was displaced at scale, freeing analysts for higher-judgement activity. The engagement is projected to deliver $24 million in three-year operational savings, with the automation rate continuing to increase as Smart Agents learn from resolved cases and evolving operational patterns.
