Duco comes from Latin – it means “I lead.” We set up the company as a way to develop ideas we had around natural language processing – to offer hosted services that simplify complex data problems. We saw our mission to lead the financial industry into a new era, unburdened by legacy technology and systems.
Duco is a leader in the ‘no code’ movement. No code is the creation of applications that can be changed and modified by anyone – without years of training in coding languages. No code tools are designed with the end user, not technical teams, in mind, making solutions more accessible and understandable. They require no previous experience or understanding of and can be implemented in a matter of hours.
No code technology allows financial organizations to be much more agile in responding to changing market conditions and to add new products in ways not previously possible. Duco puts mission critical data in the hands of the business users and enables companies to seize opportunities and be responsive to shifting requirements from clients and regulators.
What was the motivation behind the company?
In almost all businesses of significant size today, daily operations involve dealing with mountains of data. This data is often stored in many places and frequently has to be validated and transformed to make it useful, then reconciled again for safety. Often, these processes are manual and incredibly time consuming.
We decided to start in financial services and tackle reconciliation, which is a data quality control. It has traditionally been a tedious, labour-intensive process that costs organisations incredible sums of money. What we saw was that we could pick off a series of laborious tasks that had three things in common – these tasks have to be mandatory, they have to cost money, and they have to be able to be simplified by technology.
Our platform is schema free and data agnostic. It can be used for cash, securities, derivatives, crypocurrencies. It is used by global banks and asset managers, brokers, hedge funds, exchanges, as well as fintech, crypto and payment firms.
The market response was incredibly positive. We now are a recognised leader in data reconciliation globally with 15 of the top Tier 1 banks using us, and are processing over half a billion records daily, regularly.
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Duco has taken the same methodology that allowed the firm to become a leader in reconciliation to a wider variety of problems. Duco is rapidly becoming a mission-critical, enterprise level automation partner for some of the largest names in finance.
It’s not simply about manual process automation, rather we are seeing more and more companies rip out existing legacy systems and adopt cloud based as a service software to run their operations. There’s so much benefit to this way of working – there are cost savings, it’s easy to scale and time to deployment is much reduced. Duco’s software is non-invasive and works alongside the firms’ existing infrastructure making it ideally suited to modernize complex enterprise architectures.
Duco has emerged as a major player in the institutionalization of digital asset management. As firms trading or providing custody services for crypto scale and cover consumers as well as institutional processes, they have to buy or build more and more front and back-end systems to cover their growing requirements and allow them to adapt to potential unforeseen challenges.
These systems will all rapidly evolve over the next few years and process a large volume of data at peak times. Data management is a particular challenge – especially consider the sheer amount of data that flows through assets trading on the distributed ledger. A number of major financial institutions have turned to Duco as they built out their crypto divisions, and we expect this growth to continue as the asset class matures.
What can we hope to see from Duco in the future?
We set a very clear path for Duco at our establishment about the type of company we are and where we think we can add value. We’ve been incredibly successful on that journey. We’ve expanded across continents and now have more than 200 people globally.
We expect the journey to continue, we will continue to see us simplifying complex data problems in new and emerging areas to benefit our customers. Following the investment from Nordic Capital into the company last year, we are making significant investment in our platform, our commercial organization, and are planning to break into other industries with similar mission-critical data challenges.
The post A Chat with Christian Nentwich, Co-Founder and CEO at SaaS Data Automation Company: Duco appeared first on TechRound.