ReconLayer is a lightweight, spreadsheet-native break-triage tool for the middle-office desk. It reconciles an internal book against a broker file, classifies each exception by root cause, and drafts the counterparty dispute message — all inside the spreadsheet the analyst already works in.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 🧑💻 Role | Solo — product strategy, competitive research, UX, and build |
| 🏦 Domain | Institutional post-trade / middle-office operations (small alternatives managers and fund-of-hedge-funds desks) |
| 🛠️ Tools | Google Sheets + Apps Script, Gemini API, Figma |
| 🧱 Platform | Google Sheets add-on — target environment is Excel (see Design for the platform rationale) |
| 🏷️ Status | Working prototype on synthetic data — not production |
| 🗓️ Timeframe | 8 weeks |
On a lean middle-office desk, an analyst reconciles the firm's internal book against broker and custodian files every morning — largely by hand in Excel, with VLOOKUPs and eyeballed variances, under a hard settlement cutoff. Breaks that are missed or misclassified carry real operational-error costs: a one-sided trade that slips through can feed a wrong margin agreement or a mis-struck NAV.
The enterprise systems that automate this — SmartStream, Duco, EZOPS, OSTTRA triResolve/Acadia — are built and priced for large institutions. Small desks either outsource the function to their administrator or simply live in spreadsheets. The gap isn't capability. It's that no tool is sized for the lean desk doing this work manually.
Before designing anything, I ran a full trade-lifecycle competitive teardown — reconciliation, exception resolution, standing settlement instructions, collateral and margin disputes, corporate actions. The finding was consistent across every zone: there is no unserved capability gap for a solo builder. Incumbents and industry utilities blanket the entire post-trade stack.
What remains open is the last mile — the manual triage-and-communicate work the analyst still does around those systems. So ReconLayer is deliberately not a product competing with a utility. It's a thin internal layer that sits on the tool the desk already uses, and its whole value is speeding the human loop the enterprise platforms hand off.
ReconLayer ingests two datasets — the internal valuation and the broker mark-to-market — and matches them trade by trade. A deterministic rules engine classifies each exception: valuation differences over a tolerance (framed as the CSA Minimum Transfer Amount), and — critically — one-sided population / booking breaks that a simple variance sort silently drops. It produces a ranked, root-caused worklist, then uses Gemini to draft the counterparty dispute email from that output.
The split is the point: the AI writes the dispute email; a rule-based, auditable engine decides what counts as a break. That's what makes an AI tool trustworthy in a workflow where a wrong number costs money.
The build is the smaller half of the story. The differentiator is the reasoning behind it: a competitive teardown that killed a dozen tempting ideas on real market grounds, a build-vs-buy realism check on why a solo-built product can't win against networked utilities, and an explicit architecture decision about which job the model does — writing the email, not classifying the break — so a hallucination can't silently close a real one. Those are judgment signals a feature tour can't show — and they're the sections most portfolios don't have.
This is a prototype on synthetic data, scoped to a deliberate MVP cut-line: dual ingestion, rules-based detection, and AI drafting. Live system integrations, multi-broker header mapping, an adjustable tolerance slider, and an Excel / Office.js port were consciously deferred, not overlooked. Vendor and market facts cited throughout reflect research as of mid-2026 and should be re-verified before any public use.
Slide-ready takeaway: Not another recon product competing with the utilities — a thin, auditable, last-mile layer that lives in the analyst's own spreadsheet, with the AI writing the dispute email and a deterministic engine deciding what counts as a break.
ReconLayer · Middle-Office Break-Triage Tool · Overview