Smartstream, the trusted data solutions provider for leading global financial institutions and enterprises, today announces the preview of Smart Agents for Investigations, a breakthrough in financial operations that brings augmented and autonomous exception handling to reconciliations and back-office processes.

The new investigation agent combines domain-trained AI agents, workflow adoption, and embedded controls to triage, investigate, resolve, and learn from exceptions - reducing manual effort, accelerating time to resolution, and strengthening auditability. It will add a layer of intelligence on top of Smartstream’s current reconciliations and exceptions solutions. It understands the breaks context, adheres to customer playbooks and reaches out for missing information. It documents every step for audit and compliance, allowing analysts to focus on risk. Finally, it augments the analyst’s investigation with contextual information, radically changing the user experience to review and approve style interactions.

Financial institutions face exception-heavy operations in reconciliations, cash management, and back-office processes. These exceptions are complex, context-driven, and time-sensitive, often requiring manual investigation across multiple internal systems and human interactions with the counterparty. Pain points include high operational cost and people dependency, SLA breaches and settlement risk, knowledge silos and inconsistent resolution quality, and limited scalability during volume spikes.

Thomas Steinborn, Chief Product Officer, Smartstream commented: “We are very proud to introduce Smart Agents, it has been purposefully built, combining deep financial services domain knowledge with years of investment in AI technologies. Our clients have been asking for ways to reduce manual intervention and improve operational resilience, and Smart Agents delivers exactly that - an intelligent, autonomous layer that accelerates resolution, strengthens controls, and continuously learns to optimise processing. It’s a game-changer for exception-heavy workflows”.  

Delays or errors in exception handling can lead to compliance breaches and penalties, slow resolution impacts SLAs and client trust, unresolved cash breaks affect funding decisions and working capital, and manual exception handling consumes up to 70% of operational effort. These challenges make automation and intelligence critical for operational resilience – which is where Smart Agents will help financial firms and enterprises overcome these challenges.