Counterparty Data Reconciliation at Scale: A 350,000-Record Case Study – E133

About this episode

Maura Dunn discusses a case study on reconciling 350,000 counterparty records across multiple systems and the role of AI in this process.

Most counterparty data reconciliation projects fail at the same assumption: that one identifier — usually a tax ID — can resolve who you're actually doing business with. In Episode 133 of What Counts, Maura Dunn walks through a real two-year project to reconcile 350,000 counterparty records across eight systems at a company built through acquisition: four contract management platforms, one ERP carrying both customer and supplier masters, and three trading systems, each with its own naming conventions, character limits, and overflow fields. She unpacks the 18 months of unproductive matching that came first, the rule-precedence approach that finally worked once Snowflake and Elasticsearch replaced the spreadsheet attempts, and the 10-to-1 collapse from 350K records down to 35K true entities. She also makes the case for where AI fits this kind of work today — and the one thing it still can't do unless you put deep institutional knowledge into the prompt. If you want to see what's hiding in your own shared drives right now, search TrailBlazer Insight in the Microsoft Store — it scans locally for PII, HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance risks with no cloud upload and no IT ticket…

People in this episode

Guest: Maura Dunn

Topics covered

• counterparty data reconciliation
• data cleanup
• duplicate detection
• AI in data management
• post-acquisition processes

Keywords

• counterparty records
• data reconciliation
• AI
• data cleanup
• duplicate detection
• Snowflake
• Elasticsearch
• compliance risks

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: TrailBlazer Consulting, LLC, Snowflake, Elasticsearch, Microsoft Store

Products: TrailBlazer Insight

More episodes of What Counts?

• Records Management vs. Information Governance: Cutting Through the Data Noise – E135 · June 1, 2026 · 18 min
• Stop Counterparty Data Sprawl: Centralize & Control Vendor Information Before Contracts Begin – E134 · May 18, 2026 · 13 min
• Your Data Is Lying To You: Why Reconciliation Has To Come Before AI – E132 · April 21, 2026 · 27 min
• Your Data Is Messy – Can AI Actually Handle It? – E131 · April 6, 2026 · 19 min
• Contract Data Governance: Why AI Alone Won’t Fix Conflicting Terms – E130 · March 23, 2026 · 17 min
• Solving the Growth-Governance Tension: How to Accelerate Without Losing Control – E129 · March 9, 2026 · 13 min