EXCLUSIVE: “A New Reality For Reconciliation” – Nick Botha, AutoRek and Marcus Martinez, Microsoft in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Reconciliation is a backoffice necessity, but hardly strategic, right? Microsoft and its marketplace partner AutoRek would beg to disagree. Here we discover how their partnership is helping to drive AI-led innovation and unlock value from the Cinderella of the payments process.

Finance chiefs across the world’s markets still feel out of control, despite having a host of shiny new tools at their disposal. Fragmentation in back office processes continue to create irksome inefficiencies – not to mention lost opportunities.

According to a recent survey by AutoRek more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of firms say manual processes remain a persistent barrier to growth. Another study by Mangopay in March 2026 found that a remarkable 85 per cent of firms are still relying ‘fully or mostly’ on manual reconciliation processes.

The true costs of inefficiency are becoming harder to ignore, though. Far too much time is still being spent on preparing, cleaning, and moving data as opposed to actually analysing it. A lot of value remains locked away within operational workflows, particularly in data-heavy ecosystems like payments.

Not only that, but with financial services organisations facing growing regulatory scrutiny and constant pressure on operating margins, reconciliation, in particular, is now being viewed as part of the wider risk and control infrastructure rather than simply background plumbing.

A significant strategic alliance

Against this backdrop, AutoRek has worked tirelessly to develop a long-standing and successful relationship with Microsoft, focused on engineering new solutions that can bust open silos and provide valuable real-time insights across finance functions, making organisations not only more resilient, but more efficient. Built on Azure and available in the Microsoft Marketplace, AutoRek enables firms to eliminate manual reconciliation bottlenecks, reduce the cost of control, and increase confidence in regulatory reporting requirements that are now ramping up.

Through its Cloud-native platform, company delivers real-time processing of millions of transactions daily to accelerate time-to-close, as well as intelligent automation that can adapt to changing data patterns to reduce operational overheads. Rather than positioning itself as a standalone application, AutoRek prioritises interoperability, ensuring that reconciliation sits within a connected ecosystem of upstream and downstream systems. This end-to-end connectivity is critical because when systems don’t speak the same language, reconciliation becomes more complex, oversight is reduced, and errors are more likely to occur. An interoperable environment, on the other hand, creates a more unified control framework, improving visibility and strengthening governance.

This relationship is therefore much more than just another partnership; it’s an industry-wide strategic alignment. The collaboration carefully combines two complementary capabilities. AutoRek brings domain expertise in reconciliation and control frameworks, enabling automation across complex financial processes, while Microsoft provides the scalable, elastic infrastructure that is now required to support those processes at enterprise level. The shared goal is not simply to automate reconciliation but to unlock the wealth of unrealised value within it by replacing fragmented, manual reconciliation processes with a unified framework built for growth.

Preparing for the agentic future

In September 2025, AutoRek announced it had achieved the lauded Microsoft Solutions Partner Certified Software Designation for Financial Services AI. This recognition underscores AutoRek’s ability to deliver enterprise-level reconciliation software within the Microsoft ecosystem. For financial institutions, particularly those operating at the forefront of heavily regulated markets, it brings an important layer of credibility, confirming that the company meets the rigorous technical and interoperability requirements across Microsoft solution areas.

It also validates the fact that AutoRek is primed to deliver industry-specific AI capabilities, including integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot and applications built on Azure OpenAI models. Looking ahead, this tees up firms perfectly to take advantage of genAI and tools like Copilot, releasing finance teams from low-value work to focus on how financial forecasting can influence strategy and long-term growth.

We sat down with Nick Botha, VP of Payments and Retail Banking at AutoRek, and Marcus Martinez, Financial Services Industry Advocate – EMEA at Microsoft, to discuss the synergies between the two companies and the forces shaping their evolving relationship, including partnering on agentic solutions in the reconciliations process.

The Fintech Magazine: What makes the AutoRek and Microsoft collaboration more than just another technology integration? How do you think it strengthens AutoRek’s ability to support its roster of clients?

Nick Botha, AutoRek: Partnering with Microsoft is a strategic vision for us, adding a huge amount of value to our clients. They are the absolute leaders in security, reliability, and scalability, so it gives us a lot of credibility in how we go to market in a regulatory-driven buying cycle.

Providing future-ready infrastructure is key; we need to future-proof ourselves with the introduction of AI and other emerging technologies, and, again, Microsoft is a leader in that field, so we can make sure that our clients are benefiting from the relationship as it evolves.

Marcus Martinez, Microsoft: We’ve been working with AutoRek for many years now, and their reconciliation and control frameworks are deeply embedded into Azure. It’s a win-win partnership. There’s true alignment in terms of strategy and our core values. Since the beginning, AutoRek has been aligned with our product roadmap. We have spent many weeks in Munich together with our respective engineering teams to map out and build new features, so it’s an expansive relationship that covers commercial, product, and engineering.

That shows that there’s a real appetite on both sides to engage and continue to exchange value.

TFM: AutoRek’s recent payments survey said that 69 per cent of firms see manual processes as a blocker to growth. How does your collaboration address those bottlenecks?

NB: Traditionally, there’s been a lot of unrealised value locked into the reconciliation process. We work with Microsoft to unlock this potential and enable firms to gather insights and use their resources more effectively in terms of analysing that data rather than preparing processes to access it.

Data can be very difficult to use effectively, especially in the payments landscape, where there’s disparate systems and data sources. Our partnership allows us to take a very manual world of data management and transform that into a more automated, integrated environment where clients can tap into this unrealised value.

MM: That 69 per cent is a really stark number. I think it’s linked to the sheer complexity of processes that result from the organic growth of organisations.

Mostly, reconciliation is spreadsheet-based – and that worked for some time. But given the new standards in payments, there’s a lot more data now in each payment instruction than there was 10 years ago. And it’s not just structured data; sometimes a transaction can carry pictures and other documents.

This creates a completely different dynamic in terms of how you monitor transactions and how you do reconciliations. And that requires a new type of infrastructure where you need to use automation tools, but also AI to be able to make sense of this unstructured data. Our partnership shines because we can bring these capabilities together.

TFM: How does the partnership enable AutoRek to deliver the enterprise-grade resilience, security, and regulatory assurance that today’s finance leaders demand?

NB: I believe we’re one of the first organisations in the UK to be granted the Microsoft Solutions Partner Certified Software Designation for Financial Services AI. That speaks absolute volumes about our credibility to provide enterprise-grade reconciliation software to financial services businesses around the globe.

What’s also important is that we don’t see ourselves as a standalone application for our clients. AutoRek interacts with other applications, and this interoperability creates a seamless end-to-end process where systems can speak to each other. By operating within the Microsoft Marketplace, we enable data to flow freely across an organisation to help fuel its growth.

The more an organisation scales, the more that regulators will be looking at them. We’ve seen regulation tightening in the payments world, so it’s about monitoring those new rules and then looking at your systems and processes to make sure you’re embedding a culture of regulatory compliance within your business that is mirrored by the Cloud providers you work with.

MM: The expectations from regulators will not decrease. The industry is becoming more complex, and there are more attack vectors to consider. Both AutoRek and Microsoft have engaged in long-term conversations with the world’s regulators to understand where the regulatory agenda is heading. We both stay close to regulators to make sure that the solutions we create consider regulatory requirements by design, not as a bolt-on.

TFM: Can you pinpoint any interesting success stories that have arisen from your ongoing collaborative efforts?

MM: One is ClearBank, one of the largest clearing banks in the UK, which selected AutoRek as its reconciliation platform for cash reconciliations. And that has brought them a lot of benefits in terms of providing a consolidated view of how transactions are being reconciled. The other is Howden in the insurance sector, which has subsequently reported a 50 per cent increase in reconciliation performance. These efficiencies and improvements have been enabled by the fact that AutoRek is built on Azure and available in the Microsoft Marketplace, which gives the customer more flexibility in terms of procurement.

TFM: Final question – and it’s the big one. What are your predictions for what now lies ahead?

NB: Reconciliation is going to be increasingly looked at as part of the risk infrastructure of firms as opposed to an accounting process. This means it’s going to be integrated, and that it will have to scale effectively. Infrastructure providers will be selected for their AI resilience as well as their AI application suite. AI resilience is going to be key both in terms of regulation and operationally.”

There will be a lot of change, a lot of consolidation, and more new technologies introduced into the market. We will see continued innovation, and I think we’re going to see yet more regulation, of course. So it’s an uncertain time, but definitely a very exciting time. And I think it unlocks a lot of potential for the industry to collaborate to conceive new solutions.

MM: Real-time visibility will have a big role to play. When you think about the way that our industry operates, by the time you can achieve an outcome through analysis, it may well be too late because the market is very volatile. There’s a lot of uncertainty at present, and we simply cannot afford to have full visibility only every week or every month.

It needs to be available instantly – but in order to be real-time, you need the right infrastructure and you need the right platform. Looking further ahead, agentic AI will play an increasingly important part on the reconciliation stage. We’ll need to consider which parts of the reconciliation process will be delegated to agents. They provide a new paradigm; autonomous agents can handle work 24/7, they can ingest and make sense of large quantities of unstructured data, and so they will one day be a central part of the reconciliation workflow.

This is actually something that AutoRek and Microsoft are now actively working together on – the creation of a responsible agentic offering for reconciliations. It’s a particularly exciting area of emerging technology and something that I think will be transformative towards the end of 2026 and into 2027.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 34-35

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