Smartstream
Smartstream Technologies' AI Initiative
The challenge
SmartStream Technologies is a global provider of middle- and back-office technologies to the capital markets, focusing on a variety of business processes, including reconciliations, collateral management, cash and liquidity management, corporate actions processing, fees and expense management, and digital payments processing.
Approximately three years ago the firm established its Innovation Lab in Vienna, with the view to infusing artificial intelligence (AI) technology into its product suite, while simultaneously looking to develop new products from the ground up. The first offering to emerge from the Lab was SmartStream Air, an AI-enabled reconciliations tool that the firm wanted to promote to its primarily sell-side clientele.
SmartStream approached WatersTechnology for help in developing a detailed whitepaper-led promotion/education strategy, followed by a series of fireside chats with its key personnel in order to raise profile.
What we did
As SmartStream Air was new off the workbench and featured a brand of AI technology unique to the firm at the time (self-supervised learning), the campaign focused on explaining how the AI worked, how capital markets firms could identify potential use-cases for its application, and the appreciable performance benefits SmartStream Air offered its users compared with incumbent reconciliations platforms.
The initial work entailed detailed interviews with three SmartStream personnel, resulting in a 16-page whitepaper published on Risk Library – our dedicated thought leadership and research report hub – and promoted to SmartStream’s existing and prospective clients. This was followed up with a series of one-on-one video interviews exploring the premise of the application and how it is able to reconcile large datasets in a matter of seconds compared with existing performance metrics, typically measured in days or even weeks.
The campaign also featured a special report covering six different SmartStream products and their development roadmaps, plus two AI-focused quantitative surveys, promoted to WatersTechnology’s database, resulting in a further two whitepapers, also published on Risk Library.
With a successful blueprint to follow, part two of the campaign kicked off a year later, charting the development of SmartStream Air 2, the second version of the platform featuring recently evolved AI (observational learning) technology.
The results
The whitepapers published in 2020 on Risk Library, through a strategic promotional campaign to the target audience of WatersTechnology and Risk.net, generated over four thousand page views and hundreds of downloads.
The campaign also drew strong readership figures on WatersTechnology.com, with the promotional campaign featuring an animated video highlighting key benefits of SmartStream Air’s cutting-edge technology.