Gresham launches AI tool to speed up reconciliations

Gresham has launched Control Studio for its Control reconciliation product, aiming to help business users build reconciliation controls without specialist technical support.

The application uses generative AI to turn business requirements into rules and reconciliation configurations, including multi-way reconciliations across multiple data sources. It is designed to let more non-technical staff create and maintain controls themselves.

Reconciliation processes have become more complex for banks and other financial institutions as trading, settlement and clearing operations generate larger volumes of data and oversight requirements increase. Firms often rely on specialist teams to configure and update controls, which can slow changes when products or internal processes shift.

Control Studio is a self-service interface within Gresham's reconciliation offering. Users can configure data sources, matching rules, validations and exception workflows in business language rather than code.

Users can also test controls against sample data before they go live. The software can identify correlations between datasets and suggest matching keys and validation checks, while AI assistants support the creation of search expressions and enrichment rules.

Operational pressure

The launch comes as financial institutions face tighter expectations around governance and resilience in operational processes. In Europe, the Digital Operational Resilience Act has increased focus on ICT risk management, control frameworks and the use of tools outside formal technology environments.

That has added pressure on firms to expand reconciliations across critical operations while maintaining audit trails and governance. Products that move control design closer to business teams are increasingly being positioned as a way to reduce dependence on small pools of technical specialists.

Gresham said Control Studio can make reconciliations live 20 times faster than traditional approaches, though it did not provide further detail on the comparison. The aim is to remove operational bottlenecks while preserving governance and auditability in production environments.

A Senior Product Executive at Gresham said the product was built to address delays caused by technical configuration rather than a lack of business knowledge within financial institutions.

"Reconciliation has become harder to change at the pace the business now demands, not because firms lack the expertise, but because technical configuration takes too long. Control Studio puts the people who understand the data in control of the process, using generative AI to turn business requirements into the rules and configuration needed by Control. That means firms can respond faster as products, processes and regulatory requirements change, while keeping the governance, auditability and complexity they need in production," said Neil Vernon, Global Head of Product - Control and Data Service, Gresham.

Gresham focuses on data automation software for the financial services sector, including reconciliation, data management and regulatory reporting. With Control Studio, it is extending that portfolio with a tool intended to shift more day-to-day configuration work from technical teams to operations and business staff who work directly with the underlying data.

The approach reflects a broader trend in financial software, with suppliers embedding generative AI into workflow tools to help users define rules and process logic in plain language. For firms under pressure to adapt controls quickly, the value lies less in replacing existing reconciliation engines than in reducing the time and specialist effort needed to set them up and modify them.

Control Studio supports multi-way reconciliation, used when institutions need to compare more than two datasets at once across complex transaction flows. That can be particularly relevant in banking environments where records from front-office, settlement, clearing and external counterparties must be checked against each other on a near-real-time basis.

The new interface is intended to keep those controls within governed production systems rather than pushing users towards ad hoc spreadsheets or end-user computing tools. That remains a concern for financial institutions trying to balance speed of change with oversight and traceability.