ISSN 2644-240X

NOVEMBER -15 - 2020

RECONCILIATION
PLATFORM
EDITION

SATHISH N,
DEPUTY CPO FSS

RECONCILIATION
OPERATIONS MADE EASY 1 NOVEMBER - 2020
 RECONCILIATION
PLATFORM
SOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2020

RECONCILIATION
OPERATIONS MADE EASY

We not only bring in automation to increase the productivity

of tier-1 banks, ensure scalability in their operations, but also
improve the productivity of the banks and lower the dispute
volumes in order to increase customer satisfaction

D
igital payment mechanisms such as
credit, debit and prepaid cards, ATMs,
and mobile transactions, have made
combating the increased complexity of
reconciliations a top priority for banks.
The entire process of reconciliation has
historically been a manual or, at best, a partially automated
undertaking. As a result, supporting new payment classes
and file formats, managing growing transaction volumes,
and various data-source systems has become a daunting task.
To improve the banks’ payment close cycle’s effectiveness,
reduce the operational risks—including exceptions and
dispute volumes—they need a system that can cost-efficiently
scale to address evolving market demands. It would require
a system that can handle everything, from facilitating
multi-party reconciliations to onboarding reconciliations as
quickly as possible. As a leader in payments technology and
transaction processing,FSS(Financial Software andSystems)
successfully caters to these needs through its Smart
ReconSuite. As a trusted B2B brand that powers payments
globally, FSS manages over 27,000 ATMs for 30+ banks,
issues 800 million cards and reconciles over 1B transactions
per month.
SATHISH N,
DEPUTY CPO FSS
Through its reconciliation Suite, FSS offers its highly
configurable Smart Recon platform to onboard new
reconciliations and automate end-to-end operations across
payment channels. “We offer a flexible, high-performance
reconciliation platform which acts as a single system for
reconciling all digital payments,” says Sathish N, Dy CP0,
Software Products at FSS. The platform supports not just
on-us, off-us, and remote on-us (us-on) transactions and
all typical file formats made available by interchanges. It is
a highly configurable application, which can configure any
form of data and perform the reconciliation for the concerned
transaction and produce the output, irrespective of the input
file, recon rules, and output file format, whether it be binary,
XML, or more.
Aimed at improving the scalability and efficiency of
financial institutions’ reconciliation operations spanning
administrative management and data integration, and
transactional matching, the platform also handles complex
multi-party reconciliations. It supports multiple payment
classes, multi-institution, multi-currency, and has a dynamic
and customizable reporting engine for critical operational
insights. The platform effectively identifies and provisions
exceptions and invariably improves reconciliation match
13 NOVEMBER - 2020

rates for straight-through processing. Apart
from being a cloud-ready architecture,
available on Oracle Cloud, the platform
is PCIDSS3.2 compliant and offers a
comprehensive security framework with
PA DSS 3.2 certification, which ensures the
enhanced security in the payment domain.
Moreover, the platform offers integrated
general ledger (GL) reconciliation and
cross-verification. “Whatever GL has
been maintained in the core banking, we
maintain that in the system. We also do a
tally till the opening and the closing with
all the debits and the credits coming in the
GL,” says Sathish N.
Unlike the traditional transaction
settlement method, which involves
manual processes, FSS utilizes an AI/ML-
based framework. It helps banks initiate
settlement, auto scan and highlight the
new component, then configures it using
GUI, and ultimately shares the settlement
report. This end-to-end approach results
in an 80 percent reduction in time and
creates significant productivity savings
and optimization of reconciliation-based
business processes. Additionally, FSS offers
end-to-end dispute management with
its dispute and chargeback management
module, an effective workflow management
system for managing the complete lifecycle
of the dispute. “We not only bring in
automation to increase the productivity
of banks of all sizes, and ensure scalability
in their operations, but also improve
the productivity of the banks and lower
the dispute volumes in order to increase
customer satisfaction,” asserts Sathish N.
14 NOVEMBER - 2020
With its 29 years of experience in
the payment domain, FSS has become
a preferred and trustedbrandknown
for serving its broadcustomer basethat
includes multinational banks, payment
processors, and telecom operators to wallet
companies, and to successfully meet their
unique reconciliation needs. The company
has been far ahead of its competitors
when it comes to reducing time, cost,
and hassles of reconciling. For instance,
India’s largest public sector bankrequired
a solution to reconcile the fees charged by
the interchanges with the actual fees on
transactions being performed at the bank.
The criterion for winning the contract was
to reconcile around 600 million transitions
in four hours. FSS was the only vendor,
out of the five, which was able to reconcile
600 million transitions in just three hours
and 56 minutes and thereby awarded the
contract.
For large scale projects entailing
amalgamation between multiple banks
FSS engageswith big four consulting
organizations to advise customers on the
migration process For instance, post-
amalgamation of three banks in India,
the anchor bank preferred to retain FSS
Smart Recon due to the critical advisory
role played by FSS and performance and
scalability of the solution as well as assured
quality of service provided by the FSS
Managed Services teams.
The fees model for interchanges
hashelped the bank to successfully calculate
the fees charged by interchanges for every
transaction made. For instance, a large
public sector bank, required a solution to
reconcile the fees charged by the interchanges
with the actual fees on transactions being
performed at the bank. They needed to
verify that the charges were legitimate and
as per actual transactions undertaken by the
bank’s customers for its services.
The company discovered that additional
payouts approximating $57,360 were
being made by the bank. These charges
were discontinued leading to direct savings
to its bottom line. Today, SBI uses FSS
Reconciliation Suite as the end to end
reconciliation solution for its customer base
of over 450M million debit cardholders and
saves millions in interchange and settlement
fees.
FSS also works with neo banks
including India Post Payments Bank, Airtel
Payments Bank and a wallet service operated
by India’s leading conglomerate to improve
efficiency of back-office operations. Some
of the new channels such as mWallets, IMPS
and UPI are high-volume systems and have
multiple settlement cycles in a single day. At
some of these locations, FSS has gone live
in 12 weeks and has successfully scaled to
process growing transaction volumes.
Looking ahead, the aspect of being
a pure-play payments company with a
diversified portfolio of software products,
hosted payment services, and software
solutions anchors FSS towards a robust
roadmap. With its strong client base, the
company is well placed in India, the Middle
East, and the APAC region. Currently, FSS
is working with specific key processors in
the Middle East and helping them out with
their reconciliation operations.
FSS has evolved its product over
the years. With its domain expertise and
extensive global experience in managing
reconciliation products, FSS aims to
continue addressing the current market
demands effectively. “We’re aware that
the world is moving towards cloud-native,
self-optimizing reconciliation systems
embedded with sophisticatedAI and ML-
based framework fortransaction settlement,
and we are gearing ourselves towards
supporting customers make this transition,”
states Sathish N. BC
Financial Software
and Systems (FSS)
BANKINGCIOOUTLOOK.COM NOVEMBER - 15 - 2020

TOP

SOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2020

Recognized by

Financial Software and Systems (FSS)

TOP

SOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2020

Recognized by

The annual listing of 10 companies that are at the forefront of providing

Reconciliation Platform solutions and impacting the marketplace