Global Financial Services Firm Cuts Incident Backlog Tenfold with AI Agents

When a global post-trade financial services firm processes over 10 million trades a month, small operational delays quickly become big support challenges. Banks, brokers and investment firms depend on regulatory reporting platforms to process large volumes of trades accurately, consistently and on time.

This firm operated a global over-the-counter (OTC) trade reporting platform spanning more than a dozen regulatory jurisdictions and serving several tenants across the U.S. and EU, with most operating in Europe. At that scale, IT operations teams need more than visibility. They need to know which issues matter, which alerts can be trusted and where to act first.

The firm partnered with Publicis Sapient to modernize its operations with Sapient Sustain, an AI-powered operations platform that enables proactive, automated operations—reducing manual effort, improving response times and building a stronger foundation for growth.

The platform was growing. The support model was struggling to keep up.

Teams were spending significant time checking service status, reviewing alerts, confirming whether issues were real and deciding which incidents needed action. Many alerts were duplicates. Others were false positives. Genuine incidents often required experienced support teams to investigate the context before resolution could begin.

This created four clear challenges:

1. Manual work was slowing teams down: Routine checks and validation were consuming time that could have been spent improving the platform.
2. Too much noise made it harder to see real issues: Duplicate alerts and false positives made it more difficult to prioritize the incidents that mattered.
3. Growth was increasing pressure on support teams: As platform scale increased, the firm needed to manage more operational complexity without adding equivalent headcount.
4. Incidents took too long to move from detection to resolution: Support teams often had to triage issues manually before the right action could be taken.

The firm needed a better way to manage operations across a high-volume, multi-jurisdiction reporting platform.

Publicis Sapient deployed Sustain to bring AI-powered agents into the firm’s IT operations model.

Instead of asking support teams to monitor every signal manually, Sustain helped identify critical issues, validate alerts and trigger the right response workflows. This gave teams a clearer view of what was happening across the platform and where action was needed.

Sustain deployed specialized AI agents across more than 15 core services, automating recurring support activities such as extract validation, tieback resolution, job recovery, file processing validation and deal recovery.

The platform continuously monitored service performance, identified lagging services and triggered workflows when issues were detected. Integrated with ServiceNow, Sustain automatically created and enriched tickets with relevant context, helping teams reduce manual triage and resolve issues faster.

The solution helped the firm:

• Find issues earlier: Sustain monitored critical services and flagged potential problems before they escalated.
  Cut through alert noise: The platform validated alerts and reduced false positives, helping teams focus on real service risks.
• Move faster from signal to action: Automated workflows routed issues with clearer context, reducing the time needed to investigate and respond.
• Resolve recurring issues more consistently: Known support procedures were embedded into workflows, helping teams take a more repeatable approach to incident resolution.
• Create more capacity for improvement: By reducing repetitive checks and manual triage, teams could spend more time improving the service instead of constantly reacting to it.

The transformation delivered measurable improvements in speed, efficiency and operational control.

The firm achieved a 10x reduction in incident backlog, reducing open incidents from approximately 500 to 50 during the measured period. This gave teams a cleaner view of active issues and reduced the risk of important incidents being buried in a large queue.

Resolution speed also improved significantly, with 90 percent of tickets resolved in fewer than five days. The business realized 25 percent cost savings and optimized approximately 10 percent FTE capacity, allowing team members to shift from reactive support to higher-value work.

Additional results included:

• 8x improvement in mean time to resolution
• 60% reduction in hot cases
• 4.5x reduction in alerts
• 75% of tickets resolved by the L2 team
• 15% reduction in false positives

Improved alert validation helped teams focus the most critical issues and avoid unnecessary intervention. For the IT organization, Sustain created a more scalable operating model.