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Christian Nentwich, Founder & CEO Reconciliation is the bane of any financial institution. Thousands of employees onboard, match, compute, report massive quantities of data every day. Originally focused purely to exercise control, today forward-thinking financial firms are focused on transforming their reconciliation processes to drive real business value, improve efficiencies, and optimize risk. The market is littered with heavy, legacy reconciliation solutions (some that date back to the 1990s) that are good at good at solving standard cash or custody reconciliation problems but start to fail as complexity is introduced. These aging systems are becoming more and more expensive to maintain while not providing the agility to quickly take on new asset classes, customers or markets. In fact, according to Aite Group, setting up a typical reconciliation at a financial institution takes an average of 64 days. As a result, business operations teams have relied on using manual processes and people to fill the gap. These resource intensive processes provide agility but are costly and introduce potential regulatory, compliance and operational risk. "Providing industry-leading client support is fundamental to who we are. In addition, all clients get a dedicated customer success manager to help them make the most of Duco"
Duco is on a mission to tip this outdated practice on its head by making managing data easy. Duco is offering a truly disruptive take on the data quality and reconciliation industry which is in drastic need of an overhaul. It is changing the approach as to how financial firms tackle their most challenging data quality issues offering the only modern, enterprise grade alternative to costly and inefficient legacy reconciliation systems.
Game, Changed
Duco is helmed by Christain Nentwich, the co-founder and CEO of Duco. A lifelong technologist with a relentless passion for simplifying complex data using predictive machine learning and AI automation, Nentwich has led Duco from a few lines of code five years ago to an award-winning global enterprise. With a proven track record of building successful businesses and leadership teams that deliver transformational experiences to clients, Nentwich has stewarded Duco’s rapid growth as a true disruptor in the sleepy world of reconciliation.
One of the main things that set the company apart from its competitors is its ability to leverage computer science to solve real-world data complexity issues. With the proliferation of technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, data quality is quickly becoming the lifeblood of business growth and Duco is well poised to take advantage of this trend.
Duco’s self-service technology allows teams to build and manage reconciliation processes from scratch- without any sort of infrastructure project- at speed
These efforts have led the company to bag numerous prestigious awards including most recently the Best Sell-Side Reconciliation Platform” at the Waters Technology/Sell- Side Technology Awards after winning the “Best Buy-Side Reconciliation Platform” for the second consecutive year from Waters Technology/ Buy-Side Technology and “Fintech Company of the Year” by Custody Risk.
Data Quality, Starting with Reconciliation
To get data into traditional systems is often a challenge, requiring extensive ETL or data transformation projects. “The fundamental problem is that there are no data standards; data is stored in different formats in multiple systems,” says Mireille Dyrberg, COO of Duco. “We built Duco to address a range of critical issues across data quality, starting with reconciliation”. Clients can use Duco for a broad range of use cases from daily margin reconciliations, to consolidation of reference data databases, regulatory data quality assurance and massive system migrations.
Data, Democratized
Duco’s high level of usability empowers the people who know the data best to solve their most critical problems. Its “self-service” model allows end-users to normalize data without writing code, fuzzy match data that might not be available in exact format and detect and eliminate root cause of poor data quality.
The data-agnostic platform allows users to simply upload their data without pre-formatting, often cutting the ingestion process from days to seconds, and saving money that can be better used on more productive and fulfilling projects. There are no implementation projects. With Duco, end-users can normalize, validate and reconcile any type of data within hours, dramatically reducing cost and risk. There is no other system like it on the market.
“Using Duco, banks can now set up reconciliations more quickly, react to change in an agile manner, and remove dependencies on manual work. It then becomes easier to work with data and derive more value from it,” asserts Dyrberg.
Built for Digital Transformation - Secure, Scalable, Future Proof
Because Duco services key financial institutions around the globe, including 14 of the top 30 bank, providing a safe and secure environment is core to its business.
Near Immediate ROI
Unlike typical data projects that take up months implement, Duco’s core promise is to have clients live within 24 hours and with tangible business results within a month. Clients need not worry about initial setup, onboarding, training, and support as these are included in the standard offering without any hidden costs or surprises. “Providing industry-leading customer support is fundamental to who we are. In addition, all clients get a dedicated customer success manager to help them make the most of Duco,” explains Nentwich. Duco has been consistently living up to this promise, enabling clients to achieve a higher ROI in a short span. With a “always improving” mentality in its culture, Duco provides seamless monthly product upgrades to all customers to help them stay ahead of the competition.
Predictive Machine Learning
Powered by such achievements, Duco is the first company providing a true predictive machine learning solution for reconciliation within the finance sector. But they are not resting on their laurels, as they are now focused on enhancing match rates and minimizing manual intervention in the reconciliation process by investing significant resources to augment their technology with machine learning. The company will apply machine-based learning and artificial intelligence to help firms control their data more efficiently and extract ever-more-meaningful insights from that data. Taking the company’s core idea of empowering end users to aggregate, normalize, and reconcile data a step further, Duco plans to automate all phases of the reconciliation process. These include data ingestion, setup, matching, exception allocation, investigation, and resolution. “We are working toward a future where reconciliation is no longer necessary and manual intervention is minimal in all processes. As our client base grows, we will help them focus on fixing upstream, systemic issues instead of noise,” mentions Nentwich. He envisions the Duco platform to be the go-to solution for a company seeking to enhance data quality. “The Duco machine learning solution is game-changing and will help businesses save time, money and energy democratizing their data,” said Christian Nentwich, founder and CEO of Duco. “Financial institutions are undergoing a digital transformation and will need to embrace solutions like this one to succeed and increase growth and efficiencies.”
With the advancement in AI and ML technologies, the quality of the data is becoming the primary factor for business growth, and Duco is poised enough to gain from this trend.
FREMONT, CA: Duco, a data engineering technology company that provides self-service data engineering in the cloud, has disclosed that it has incorporated predictive machine-learning (ML) into its Duco Data Integrity and Reconciliation platform.
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Mama Money is a rapidly growing international payments company that enables people to send money to 15 countries across Africa and Asia with fees as low as 3% to promote financial inclusion and help alleviate poverty. Sending money to Africa is the most expensive region in the world with major banks charging as much as 20% or more in fees. Previously Mama Money used in-house systems and manual processes to perform vital reconciliations. Following a detailed market evaluation, Mama Money chose Duco based on its self- service automation capabilities, flexibility and the potential for rapid impact.
Nicolas Vonthron, Chief Operating Officer at Mama Money explained, “Duco’s advanced technology offered us something different compared to other platforms that were not originally designed for the cloud. The deployment was surprisingly quick and we saw an immediate impact on our reconciliation and financial control processes. Duco gives us great flexibility and scalability to grow our volumes without needing additional staff to oversee this time-consuming process.”
Christian Nentwich, CEO of Duco concluded, “Mama Money is a disruptive service in the mobile payments market. By bringing cashless money transfers to migrant workers, it is making a real difference to tackling social problems. In an environment where margins are slim, and where transactions go real-time, the value of a cloud-based reconciliation platform that offers a rapid deployment, fast time to value and quick ROI is invaluable. We look forward to playing our small part in enabling Mama Money’s service to expand rapidly in the next few years.”