Success Story
A leading investment management firm now reviews 100% of trades before they are ever sold, up from fewer than 1%, and ensuring customer' cost basis method is set accurately. The solution adds more than 40,000 hours of capacity a year and roughly $4.7M in annual value, and it catches cost basis errors before they ever reach a customer.
Every day, the firm's customers sell securities. When they do, they can choose a cost basis method. That choice sets their gains, their losses, and the taxes they owe.
The customer's selection then passes through several of the firm's systems. Each handoff adds a chance that the method gets reassigned. Last year, 600 trades were executed on the wrong cost basis, and each one put customer trust on the line.
The Cost Basis Controls Oversight team is responsible for catching these errors. Reviewing every flagged transaction by hand would take capacity the team did not have. So they reviewed a sample of fewer than 1% of flagged transactions, trading full coverage and accuracy for speed.
As part of the firm's AI program, Ashling built an automated trade monitoring and detection solution on UiPath. It reviews every flagged transaction, every day, and hands the team only the cases that need their judgment.
The workflow runs in a clear sequence:
- Start with the daily exception report. Every transaction on the report should have followed the default cost basis path, with no specific lot or method selected at the start.
- Answer one question per trade. For each transaction, the automation checks whether the customer selected an individual lot or cost basis method when the order was placed.
- Escalate the mismatches. When a matching trade shows a specific method was selected, the case is escalated to the Cost Basis Controls Oversight team.
- Deliver a daily email report. Every finding lands in one report. Team members review the flagged items and apply corrections to the trades that truly need their attention.
The team stays in the loop at the point where it matters most: the correction. That human-in-the-loop design keeps every decision accurate, accountable, and backed by a clear audit trail.
Review coverage rose from fewer than 1% of flagged transactions to 100%. The team no longer has to choose between speed and full coverage.
The solution adds more than 3,000 hours of capacity each month, over 40,000 hours a year, and delivers roughly $4.7M in annual value. That time now goes to the trades that need human judgment.
And coverage holds on peak days. When trade volumes climb, the solution scales with them, so every flagged transaction still gets reviewed.
Technology
