How Smartstream’s Affinity Is Using AI to Cut Reconciliation Work by 10×
•February 24, 2026
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Why It Matters
The AI‑powered reduction in reconciliation effort translates into massive cost savings and faster reporting for financial firms, while the roadmap toward blockchain‑enabled collateral promises new revenue streams and operational resilience.
Key Takeaways
- •AI reduces reconciliation manual labor from 45 hours to three.
- •Affinity resolves about 50% of remaining unmatched records via AI.
- •Data strategy precedes AI; unstructured PDFs now ingestible.
- •Upcoming Agentic AI to automate exception investigations further.
- •SmartStream explores blockchain smart contracts for collateral assetization.
Summary
SmartStream’s Chief Product Officer Thomas Steinborn introduced Affinity, an AI‑driven reconciliation platform that dramatically cuts manual effort. By applying machine‑learning to the residual 10,000‑plus unmatched records in large data sets, Affinity automates roughly half of those cases, shrinking labor from 40‑45 hours to about three hours—a tenfold efficiency gain.
The presentation emphasized that a robust data strategy is a prerequisite for AI success. SmartStream has invested in ingesting both structured financial data and unstructured sources such as PDFs, enabling the AI engine to produce reliable matches. Current clients already report the 50% AI‑driven resolution rate, and the company is rolling out an “Agentic AI” layer to further automate exception handling and investigative workflows.
Steinborn highlighted concrete results: a single client reduced reconciliation time by 42 hours, and in payments processing, 3‑5% of billions of daily transactions still require manual resolution. SmartStream’s Smart Payments solution automates response loops with counterparties, while future plans explore blockchain‑based smart contracts to tokenize collateral, turning it into tradable assets.
The implications are clear: banks and financial institutions can achieve significant cost savings, faster close cycles, and lower operational risk. By coupling AI with emerging distributed‑ledger technology, SmartStream positions itself to lead the next wave of automation in payments and collateral management, reshaping industry standards through 2026 and beyond.
Original Description
Reconciliation is one of the most resource-intensive processes in financial operations — and even a tiny exception rate can create thousands of manual cases.
In this video, we explore how Smartstream’s Affinity platform is using AI to dramatically reduce unresolved reconciliation items and transform back-office productivity.
Recorded at Sibos 2025, Thomas Steinborn, Chief Product Officer at Smartstream, explains how Affinity targets the “exception tail” — the small percentage of unmatched records that consume the majority of human effort.
Across live deployments, Affinity is handling around half of previously unresolved items. In one case, manual effort dropped from 40–45 hours to roughly three hours — close to a 10× productivity improvement.
Key themes covered in this episode:
• AI-driven financial reconciliation
• Exception management automation
• Agentic AI in banking operations
• Unstructured data ingestion (PDFs and documents)
• Payments exception handling
• Smartstream Smart Payments controls
• Workflow orchestration and investigation automation
• Distributed ledger and smart contract exploration
Before AI can deliver value, Steinborn stresses the importance of a strong data strategy. Clean, structured financial data — combined with intelligent extraction from unstructured sources — is essential for meaningful automation.
Even as automation improves, exceptions don’t disappear. That’s where “agentic AI” enters the picture — software capable of initiating actions, coordinating workflows, and resolving cases rather than simply flagging them.
Smartstream is building toward a future where the operations stack becomes increasingly autonomous, data-aware, and capable of handling the most complex cases with minimal manual intervention.
This isn’t just about reconciliation efficiency.
It’s about:
• Reducing operational bottlenecks
• Cutting exception backlogs
• Freeing teams from repetitive investigation work
• Accelerating payment resolution
• Improving accuracy and control
• Preparing operations for AI-driven automation
• Enabling scalable financial infrastructure
If you work in banking operations, payments, treasury, reconciliation, financial control, or fintech automation, this video provides practical insight into how AI is reshaping financial back-office workflows.
Explore how Smartstream is transforming reconciliation with AI :
@SibosTV@smartstream
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