How UK Financial Services Is Stuck on Reconciliation
Across conversations with finance directors, CFOs and heads of finance operations in the UK financial services and insurance sector, a surprisingly consistent picture has emerged: reconciliation is broken, everyone knows it, and almost nobody has fixed it. The conversations were not prompted by a sales agenda.
We wanted to understand, honestly, where the pain sits, what firms are using to manage it, and why, in 2026, so many finance teams are still relying on spreadsheets to reconcile hundreds of millions of pounds of transactions every month.
Finding 1: Insurance Reconciliation Is The Most Painful And The Most Ignored
When we asked finance leaders to identify their most difficult reconciliation processes, the responses from insurance were immediate and consistent. Commission reconciliation came up in almost every conversation. So did premium versus collected, bordereau management, and reinsurance settlement.
What made these answers notable was not their frequency. It was their specificity. Finance directors did not describe vague operational discomfort. They described the exact processes that regularly fail, the exact points in the value chain where data breaks down, and the exact human costs in time and exposure.
The insurance value chain is long and very complex. Constant reconciliation between parties is paramount. Getting it right, and keeping it right, is a right royal pain - Head of Finance Operations, UK insurance group
The commission reconciliation problem is particularly acute for managing general agents and brokers. Commission is often netted off at source, creating a situation in which the figure a firm expects and the figure it receives diverge before anyone has had a chance to check. Tracing the discrepancy back through policy admin systems, bordereaux, and carrier statements is a manual, time-consuming process with no automated equivalent at any accessible price point.
Bordereau management, which covers the reconciliation of structured data flowing between MGAs, insurers, and reinsurers, was described by multiple respondents as the single most labour-intensive reconciliation process in their organisations. The irony, as one finance director put it, is that "the bordereau has been around for three hundred years, and we are still processing it in Excel."
Reinsurance settlement was flagged as a less frequent but higher-stakes problem. The value of individual discrepancies is larger, the number of counterparties is greater, and the reconciliation tools are less equipped to handle the complexity of multi-party buy-side and sell-side matching.
The top 5 Insurance recon types consistently flagged as most painful;
Commission · Premium vs collected · Bordereau · Reinsurance settlement · Claims
Finding 2: The Mid-market Is Stuck Between Two Bad Options
Across every conversation, a structural problem emerged with unusual clarity. The firms we spoke to are too large and too complex to run their reconciliation processes manually without significant operational risk. But they are not large enough to justify the cost of the enterprise platforms that exist to solve the problem.
The result is a market segment covering mid-tier insurers, MGAs, asset managers, and banking groups with complex entity structures, which sits in a gap that vendors have collectively failed to address.
The tools are expensive and come with limited support. Mid-tier companies cannot afford the top-tier providers. The market is highly fragmented, and many of these tools are drop-and-go models with little or no post-implementation support - Senior finance leader, UK financial services group
The enterprise vendors most cited, including dedicated reconciliation platforms and finance close automation tools, were described consistently in the same terms: well-regarded, effectively positioned, and prohibitively priced for organisations outside the top tier. Implementation timelines of twelve to eighteen months were mentioned repeatedly. Total cost of ownership estimates in the hundreds of thousands of pounds were treated as facts rather than surprises.
Spreadsheets are not a solution to this problem. They acknowledge that no solution exists at an accessible price point. Multiple finance directors described their current approach not as a strategic choice but as a default they have arrived at by elimination.
3-5 Days lost per month-end close to manual reconciliation exceptions: Across organisations in our conversations, this was the most consistent operational cost cited
Finding 3: The Vendor Landscape iI Broken for the Firms That Need It Most
We asked respondents about the tools and platforms they are aware of or currently using. The answers revealed a market that is highly segmented, with clear concentration at the enterprise end and a notable absence of credible options below it.
The specialist reconciliation platforms that exist are well-suited to large insurers and capital markets firms. They carry deep functionality for the recon types those firms need: CASS compliance, high-volume securities matching, and finance close automation. They are priced accordingly. For the organisations we spoke to, these platforms represent a ceiling they cannot reach rather than a floor they are building from.
The ERP modules available within major enterprise systems were consistently described as insufficient. Not unusable, but insufficient. They handle general ledger-level reconciliation adequately. They do not handle transaction-level matching, multi-entity intercompany reconciliation across separate GL structures, or any of the insurance-specific reconciliation types that create the most operational pain.
Multi-entity intercompany reconciliation remains hard. The various subsidiaries are usually on separate GL structures. It is not clear how to overcome this unless the reconciliation tool imports various balances into a central data hub and matches from there - Finance director, multi-entity financial services group
This observation points to something important. The firms experiencing the most acute pain are not looking for a marginal improvement to an existing process. They are looking for a fundamentally different architectural approach, one that treats reconciliation as a data problem requiring a centralised data hub rather than a workflow problem requiring a checklist.
Finding 4: Firms Know They Have a Problem. They Just Do Not Know What To Do.
Perhaps the most striking finding from our conversations was not the extent of the pain, which was considerable, but the degree of resignation that has built up around it. Finance directors described processes that were costing their organisations hundreds of hours per month and, in some cases, measurable financial leakage, with a matter-of-factness that suggested they had stopped expecting things to change.
This is not indifference. It is the product of a market that has consistently offered these organisations a binary choice: pay a prohibitively high price or continue with what you have. Most have chosen the latter not because they prefer it, but because no third option has been clearly presented.
The conversations we had suggest that there is an appetite for change. What is missing is a credible path to it. Several respondents described previous evaluation processes that had stalled not because the solution was wrong, but because the commercial model, the implementation timeline, or the ongoing support model made the business case unachievable.
When we asked what a realistic solution would look like, the answers converged on a small number of requirements: it needed to address the full reconciliation lifecycle, not just the matching step; it needed to integrate with existing systems rather than replace them; it needed to be live within weeks, not months; and it needed an ongoing support model that reflected a genuine partnership rather than a licence renewal.
67% Of finance teams still use Excel as their primary reconciliation tool. Even where specialist platforms have been purchased, spreadsheets persist for exception handling
Finding 5: What Good Actually Looks Like
Across our conversations, a picture emerged of what finance leaders are genuinely trying to achieve. Not in aspirational terms, but in practical operational ones.
The starting point is data. Reconciliation is fundamentally a data problem: data extracted from multiple source systems in different formats, transformed into a common structure, matched against counterpart data, and exceptions identified for resolution. The firms experiencing the most acute pain are those in which this data flow is manual at every step, with extraction, transformation, and matching performed by people rather than systems.
From there, the requirements are sequential. Matching needs to be automated, with rules that reflect the complexity of the specific reconciliation type: many-to-one matching for commissions, fuzzy matching for amounts that net differently at different stages of the insurance chain. Exceptions need to be routed to the right person with the right context, not deposited into a shared inbox. Resolution decisions need to be logged. GL postings need to flow from the resolution, not from a subsequent manual entry. And the whole process needs to produce an audit trail that withstands regulatory scrutiny.
The term that came up most consistently across our conversations was not a product name or a vendor category. It was control. Finance leaders want to be in control of their reconciliation processes: to know, at any point, the status of every open item, the history of every resolved break, and the confidence level of their closing position. That is not an ambitious ask. It is a basic requirement of financial stewardship that the current tooling landscape is not meeting.
What This Means
The picture that appears from these conversations is not one of firms waiting to be sold something. It is one of the finance leaders who has accepted a level of operational pain as normal because the market has not offered them a credible alternative.
The gap between the cost of doing nothing and the cost of enterprise tooling is the defining commercial reality of reconciliation in the UK mid-market. It is populated by organisations running complex, high-value reconciliation processes on infrastructure built for a simpler era, staffed by people skilled enough to keep it running but increasingly stretched by volume, regulatory pressure, and the pace of change.
The opportunity for technology providers is not to sell these firms a platform. It is to give them back control: to reduce the time between a transaction occurring and a reconciliation position being confirmed, to replace manual exception management with automated exception routing, and to make the audit evidence that regulators and auditors require a by-product of the process rather than a project in its own right.
