Get to Know Conductor. We Think You’ll Like (and Trust) It.

Charles Lyell, a 19th century Scottish polymath, once said, “Never call an accountant a credit to his profession. A good accountant is a debit to his profession.”

It’s hard not to respect an accounting joke that still stands up after a couple hundred years. But the truth is that accountants, regardless of how much value they bring to a company, are expensive. Automation today – if done right – can maximize that investment so you are deploying your resources where they can add the most value, and not knuckling in numbers for a spreadsheet.

But in financial services, where the accuracy of numbers is priority number one, firms have been slow to overhaul their data operations. That’s because those who invest in data engines sometimes find the systems require so much human oversight that they produce little efficiency or cost savings.

At Harmonate, we have a singular focus on data solutions that deliver significant gains in efficiency through outstanding accuracy.

Our solution for fund administrators, Conductor, won’t only revolutionize your accounting department. It can combine faster data processing with intuitive user interfaces to accelerate the speed to insight for all members of your organization.

As our CTO, Richard Scheffrin shared in a recent installment of the Harmonate Fund Services Leadership Series, here’s how it works in four steps:

Classify: Our exception-based machine learning software is the product of 15 years of engineering in financial services, meaning that it understands what documents to expect and recognizes them as it collects incoming data from sources like email accounts, OneDrive and Intralinks. If Conductor isn’t sure what it’s looking at, it flags the item as an “exception” for human review. Once you teach the software once, it won’t have to ask again. In this way, the application becomes increasingly efficient over time.

Extract: Once Conductor understands the document type – a capital account statement, trade confirmation or subscription agreement, for instance – it can parse natural language to pick data out of paragraphs of text in documents like contracts and annual reports. This work traditionally requires teams of people to collect documents and input figures into spreadsheets that comprise the general ledger or data warehouse. That’s a process that can take days depending on the complexity. With Conductor, it takes minutes.

Normalize: Once data has been extracted, Conductor “flattens” it so everything is in the same format and can be compared to each other. When you export out to the general ledger, the technology will know exactly what the data means. That’s time-consuming work for your accounting department, but almost instantaneous using our software. And it only becomes faster as Conductor become more familiar with your operations.

Verify: Lastly, Conductor meticulously goes through the data to make sure it’s doing what it says it does. Importantly, this process involves AI, machine learning and natural language processing to identify what is in the data and whether anomalous info can be reconciled with other content in the same data. By looking at the data from every possible dimension, Conductor aims to bring the probability of error down to zero.

Because Conductor operates on a scalable cloud-based platform, it won’t slow down regardless of how many tasks it takes on. Additionally, Harmonate utilizes serverless computing that means you only pay for the server space that you need.

At Harmonate, we know that fund administrators are much more than accountants. But we also know that significant resources go into traditional accounting tasks. The more efficient fund administrators become in these functions, the more value they deliver to customers — and the more they can focus on turning this data into actionable insights.