A new service, from custodian BNY Mellon to its market-participant clients, helps these avoid about 40–50 percent of their settlement fails. In PostTrade 360° Helsinki on Wednesday, digital business leader Victor O’Laughlen shared his inside view.

Some of BNY Mellon’s large clients pay 10–20 million dollars a year for failing settlements, and then inefficiencies in the daily cash allocation comes on top. A problem, yes. But also a great case for machine learning, if BNY Mellon’s Victor O’Laughlen is to believe.

His session in the Helsinki conference went through the case – but also a number of principles for how to set up projects and solutions in the growing area.

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PostTrade 360 Nordic 2024

“In my view many underestimate the impact that this area will have,” says Victor O’Laughlen.

The purpose has been to build a machine learning model that brings insights you can’t achieve with traditional coding models. Machine learning is one category of artificial intelligence.

”Feature engineering” is a key part of setting up the solution. It is important to understand the sources of data, and the drivers of fails. This takes a somewhat science-like work process, where the stories of the staff are used to generate hypotheses which are then evaluated against data.


• News from the PostTrade 360° Helsinki event is gathered here
• The 32-page pdf magazine, which includes the agenda, can be downloaded by clicking here.
• For a 3-page breakout of the agenda section, click here
• By the way … are we connected on LinkedIn already, among the 2,000 post-trade pros who are? Follow us here.