Replaced four reconciliation analysts with a swarm of specialist agents.

Day-end recon was eating four full-time analysts and still missing breaks. A 14-month engagement put a deterministic agent stack in front of the back office and reassigned the team to client-facing analytics.

What was actually broken.

The firm closed each trading day with a four-person reconciliation team chasing breaks across three custodians, two order-management systems, and a 14-tab Excel workbook that nobody owned. Breaks regularly slipped past T+1 and into T+3, which triggered compliance flags and a quarterly write-off run-rate north of $400K. The CFO had already greenlit two prior automation attempts — both stalled because the data lived in PDFs, faxed statements, and a fragile DDE feed from one of the custodians. Headcount was the only lever they had pulled.

What we did, and what we deliberately did not do.

We started with a two-week diagnostic: mapped every break, traced it to source, and ranked them by frequency × dollar exposure. 78% of the breaks were three patterns. We built deterministic agents for those three first — a custodian-ingestion agent (with structured outputs over the PDF and DDE feeds), a position-matching agent with a tolerance ladder, and a break-explanation agent that wrote audit-ready memos. We deliberately kept a human-in-the-loop on the long-tail 22% for the first six months while we collected enough labeled cases to retrain. Production cutover was phased per custodian to keep the audit trail clean.

“We had spent two years and seven figures trying to make reconciliation go away. FirmAdapt scoped it in two weeks and shipped it in eleven. The work I assumed was permanently human is just gone now — and the team that used to chase breaks is doing client analytics.”

What the numbers did, twelve months in.