Gresham Technologies Expands Use of RPA for Reconciliations

Gresham Technologies is expanding its use of robotic process automation (RPA) as part of a broader move into some “traditional” reconciliations it was not previously closely targeting.

CTO Neil Vernon says RPA capabilities embedded within the company’s Clareti data integration platform can help with certain types of reconciliations, such as in cash and nostro accounts. 

A nostro account is an account held by a bank in another bank, often in a foreign currency. The process of reconciliation with a custodian can be repetitive, the kind of task that is a good candidate for automation.

“Our customers have previously used us for doing these kind of reconciliations by configuring our products,” Vernon says. “We are now offering that configuration within the product ready to go.”

As a result of vulnerabilities laid bare by the coronavirus, automation projects throughout the industry are likely to increase. The CTO at a hedge fund with more than $25 billion under management tells WatersTechnology that they anticipate investing more on automation projects in the middle and back offices once there’s more certainty around the long-term impact of the coronavirus. “With people all over the place, it did create some unforeseen challenges that we’ll look to address, and RPA might be appropriate,” says the CTO.

Gresham began its investment in RPA technology a few years ago after noticing that some of its clients were automating the vendor’s products with third parties like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, both specialist developers of RPA software.

Customers were asking Gresham if Blue Prism would work with Clareti. “We looked at it and said, ‘Well, it will work,’” Vernon says. “These are the interfaces we’ve got, these are the ways that you can use a Blue Prism or an Automation Anywhere; it will work.”

But, he says, Gresham was not willing to make any guarantee to their customers around the location of buttons on their keyboards or screens. RPA has limitations in that it needs precise settings to work, so if software is updated and a button that previously represented one function then changes to represent something else, the bot could break down.

“For some of our customers, the first we knew that they were driving our software through a Blue Prism was not when they came to us and said, ‘Can we do it?’” Vernon says. “It was when they upgraded and said, ‘You did not tell us that you changed the name of this button, and some of my automation is now failing. Can you can you let us know in the future that you’re changing button names?’”

Vernon says, however, that his warnings are not a criticism of RPA vendors, which have benefited his clients. “There are areas where people get advantage from Blue Prism or any of the other tools, which is around some forms of integration, where a robot will pull data out of a Bloomberg Terminal, and then write that data into Clareti,” he says. “So where there is an integration element to the robotics, that’s not an area where we want to get involved.”

Gresham built its RPA capabilities independently, but it wasn’t alone. For its first foray, it worked with one of its customers, a large US bank that had transaction reporting inefficiencies. Reporting, which involves a series of repetitive tasks, is also ripe for automation.

Vernon says some of Gresham’s clients have been able to automate away some 80 percent of resources from day-to-day activities to other activities.