As we start the New Year with clear and fresh minds, we want our customers to benefit from the same clarity when using Duco. Our first release of the year focuses on better visibility and streamlining your experience using Duco, saving you time and headaches on your critical reconciliations.

This release brings:

• New EMIR EU exception dashboards to support your EMIR Refit processes
• Better visibility of historical data with archived and deleted data visible in the interface
• The New Streamlined Exceptions Management Interface becomes default for Non-Cash reconciliations
• We're bringing all the benefits of the streamlined exception management screens to governance pages. You'll be able to sort, filter, resize and pin columns, as well as infinite scroll through large amounts of data.

In addition, we would like to inform you about upcoming updates to the encryption ciphers used in the SFTP file submissions. Make sure you check your files to avoid interruption. 

EMIR EU exception dashboards

Our EMIR exceptions dashboard will now help you visualise your open exceptions from the latest runs of your EMIR EU trade processes. 

The dashboard includes exceptions views by

• Process
• Exceptions age
• Assigned group
• Workflow status
• Asset class

Drilling down, you can see details and access filtered results, enabling you to label, assign and take other actions quickly. You can also export results for MI reporting or to address specific areas within your organisation. 

EMIR EU dashboards will be followed by similar dashboard capabilities for other regimes, as well as enhanced dashboard capabilities for other products and solutions across the Duco platform to further empower you to manage your data exceptions. 

If you have to do EMIR reporting reconciliations, talk to your relationship manager about how you can access this new capability.

New in Reconciliations

Better visibility of historical data

As you may be aware, your data is safely maintained on our database for you to interact with on the Duco platform over a certain period of time. This is usually 90 business days (unless you have negotiated any contractual exceptions with your Duco account manager), after which your data is stored away on file - a process we refer to as data archiving. You can still access this data via Excel downloads throughout your contractual retention period.

By the end of February, you will notice several visual cues on the system to clearly indicate which runs have undergone the archival process, and which ones are no longer accessible as a result of exceeding the specific data retention period agreed on your contract. This will better support you and your teams in your day-to-day operations, as you will be able to easily see this information on each process’ overview and run history pages, leaving you with a much cleaner view of your processes allowing you to better focus on the active runs.

 

 

For consistency and better transparency, we have decided to introduce similar changes in the user interface in relation to historical data that has been deleted in line with your specific data retention terms. The run history page will still provide you with run dates and times for any deleted runs, but upon navigating to a deleted run you will now be presented with an updated screen to indicate the run data is no longer available.

 

 

Making the new Exceptions Management user interface the default for all clients

Back in summer as part of our July release, we announced a new Exceptions Management user interface with a whole host of improvements to make your day-to-day reconciliations and exceptions handling a much smoother and quicker task. Hopefully your teams have familiarised themselves with all the time-saving new features and are enjoying the improved experience!

This month we are taking this a step further and making the new user interface the default for everyone! Note that this will not change the availability of the old user interface, as you will still have the ability to switch between the old and new interfaces as you please, however we do recommend you to get used to the new version as the old one will no longer be supported in a few months’ time.

Migration of several pages to latest technology

As part of our ongoing efforts to migrate UI elements from legacy platforms to our preferred UI technology stack, this month we are presenting refreshed looks for the below Duco pages - applicable to all vanilla reconciliations and cash processes:

• Staging copies
• Process history

Note the refreshed pages do not imply any changes to existing functionality; you can perform the same actions around staging copies as you have been doing to date (i.e. view staging copies as well as open, apply and close change requests), and the process history page will continue to show you the history of all runs for a given process as well as run times and match evolution data. 

Staging copies

Process history

New in Data Prep

This month we are improving our calendar pick list. Apart from selecting dates from a calendar, when composing NRL rules, users are now able to type in dates manually to avoid swiping through the calendar for distant dates.

We are also providing you with enhanced controls. Data Prep will alert you when you manually generate a snapshot with no data, ensuring that you don't send empty snapshots to downstream processes.

New look and feel of governance pages

This month we have refreshed a few Duco governance pages, specifically:

• Submissions page
• Audit log
• Submissions routing

We have used the latest technologies to make sure you can benefit from improved performance and a sleek view of these pages. This includes the ability to sort, filter, resize and pin columns as well as benefit from infinite scroll, so you don’t have to bother with pagination.

All the actions in the submission routing page (adding or deleting a route) are available on the right hand side and you can find a search box at the top of the table.

New processes page

Processes list was updated to use the same table as in other parts of the application. This means you can now benefit from using full screen mode, infinite scroll, adjust and move columns as well as pin them. On the left hand side you have a collapsable menu to navigate through different pages of Duco application.

We will continue updating more pages in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Deprecation notice: outdated encryption ciphers used in SFTP file submissions

Files submitted by your company to Duco via SFTP are sent through securely using encryption. Duco supports multiple encryption algorithms. From time to time we review these algorithms to make sure they adhere to the latest security standards, introduce new ones as well as deprecate outdated ones. 

By March 2024, we will be deprecating some of these algorithms which are now deemed outdated by industry security experts. 

There is a chance that the SFTP client software used by your company is sending us files using one of these algorithms. Normally these software will handle this seamlessly by asking for all algorithms we support, and switch automatically. Feel free to share this information with your IT department or team familiar with the matter to confirm.

Ciphers to be deprecated

KEX (Key exchange):

• diffie-hellman-group1-sha1
• diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1
• diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256

MAC :

• hmac-md5
• hmac-md5-96
• hmac-sha1-96

Encryption ciphers:

• aes128-cbc
• aes192-cbc
• aes256-cbc
• 3des-cbc

Full list of supported ciphers after deprecation

For your reference, here is the list of all the algorithms that we already support now, and will continue to do so after the deprecation mentioned above, until the next review.

KEX:

• diffie-hellman-group14-sha256
• diffie-hellman-group16-sha512
• diffie-hellman-group18-sha512
• curve25519-sha256
• curve25519-sha256@libssh.org
• curve448-sha512
• ecdh-sha2-nistp521
• ecdh-sha2-nistp384
• ecdh-sha2-nistp256

MAC:

• hmac-sha2-512
• hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com
• hmac-sha2-256
• hmac-sha2-256-etm@openssh.com
• hmac-sha1
• hmac-sha1-etm@openssh.com

Encryption ciphers:

• aes128-gcm@openssh.com
• aes256-gcm@openssh.com
• chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com
• aes256-ctr
• aes192-ctr
• Aes128-ctr

Fixed bugs