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Is your team spending more time chasing spreadsheets than driving strategy?
As trade volumes surge, businesses scale, and regulations like T+1 compress settlement timelines, the pressure on operations teams has never been greater. In fact, 77% of capital markets firms reported reconciliations are one of the top areas their teams still need to manually intervene due to errors – quickly causing bottlenecks, slowed operations, increased risk of error, and a drain on valuable resources.
If your teams are also stuck in this cycle, it might be time to rethink your approach. In this post, we’ll explore five clear signs that your organisation is ready to automate reconciliations, and how making the switch can unlock speed, accuracy, and peace of mind.
1. Your teams spend hours (or even days) on manual reconciliation
Increasing volumes of data, transactions, and workloads naturally put a strain on resources. Unmatched items slow down operations, often lengthening resolution times by hours or even days, increasing the likelihood of errors happening.
Our research, in partnership with Crisil Coalition Greenwich, found that 62% of capital markets firms still manage up to a quarter of reconciliations manually. Translated into time, one Xceptor customer shared that their teams used to spend up to a day on some reconciliations which could have been spent elsewhere. Since implementing Xceptor’s reconciliation software, this has been reduced to just 15 minutes for the largest reconciliations.
Manual reconciliation not only delays resolution but also shifts focus away from root cause analysis and strategic improvements. And, when exception management becomes the norm rather than the rareity, it’s a clear signal that automation is no longer a nice-to-have.
2. You’re scaling fast, but your operations team can’t keep up
Business growth, while positive, can also bring some drawbacks if you’re not prepared for it, resulting in increased pressure on operations teams to scale.
As volumes and complexity increase, the cracks start to show; errors creep in, timelines slip, and operational costs rise, along with the risk of missed reconciliations, compliance breaches, and reputational damage. If your reconciliation success depends on adding headcount or extending processing hours to be resolved, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
On the flip side, automation enables firms to handle higher volumes with speed and precision, without compromising on accuracy, control, or regulatory compliance. It’s the difference between reacting to growth and being ready for it.
3. You lack real-time visibility into reconciliations
In today’s fast-moving markets, waiting until end-of-day – or worse, the end of the month – to understand your reconciliation status is no longer viable. Manual processes often mean fragmented data, siloed systems, and delayed reporting, leaving teams in the dark about where issues lie and how to resolve them. Without real-time insight, decision-making suffers, and operational risk increases.
Automation enables continuous reconciliation and real-time dashboards, giving teams instant visibility into exceptions, trends, and performance metrics. This not only improves responsiveness but also empowers proactive risk management and better strategic planning.
4. Decreased motivation and productivity
Manual reconciliations don’t just drain operations teams; they pull professionals away from the work they were hired to do. Instead of focusing on innovation, system improvements, or cybersecurity, IT teams often find themselves firefighting: patching together data pipelines, troubleshooting spreadsheet errors, and maintaining fragile manual workflows.
This misalignment not only affects productivity but also morale. Most IT professionals are motivated by solving complex problems and driving transformation, not by chasing down version mismatches or reconciling data across siloed systems. When reconciliation is automated, IT can shift focus back to initiatives that have impact, while the business benefits from more reliable, scalable, and transparent processes.
5. Regulatory risk, auditing pressure & risk of fines
With tighter regulations and rising client expectations, firms are under pressure to reconcile more frequently, with greater transparency and faster turnaround times.
When reconciliations are manual, inconsistencies are inevitable. Scattered documents, shaky version control, and reliance on tribal knowledge all contribute to a disjointed audit trail. This not only slows down internal processes but also raises red flags for auditors, who are left questioning data integrity. The result? Teams spend excessive time digging through spreadsheets and emails to patch together a story that should have been clear from the start.
Under the upcoming T+1 settlement cycle in Europe (set for 2027) and its rollout in North America, not adhering to these regimes could not only increase trade failures but, the risk of cash penalties for non-compliance.
Our research with Crisil Coalition Greenwich demonstrated this, revealing a some respondents cited having to put aside up to 5% of annual capital as a remediation reserve, underscoring the growing need to evaluate current ways of working and look at data transformation solutions.
Is it time for you to automate?
If you’re faced with fragmented, inconsistent, or unclear data along with any of the challenges mentioned above, it’s time to introduce automation to your reconciliation processes.
Xceptor is built to solve this.
With a 95% straight-through processing rate, Xceptor helps you stay ahead by transforming and normalising data before it even reaches the reconciliation stage, then taking this data to enable smarter, faster, and more accurate operations.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your reconciliation process? Discover how Xceptor can help you automate reconciliations, streamline exception management, and gain real-time operational insight. Get in touch with us for a personalised demo and take the first steps towards smarter, faster, and reliable reconciliations.
