Mangopay has published research suggesting that most high-volume UK businesses still rely on manual processes for payment reconciliation, pointing to a gap between industry claims of automation and day-to-day operations.

The study surveyed senior finance and payments executives at UK companies processing at least 50 million transactions a year. It found that 85% still use fully or mostly manual reconciliation, despite wider investment in artificial intelligence and payments infrastructure.

The results suggest automation has been introduced unevenly, with some parts of payment operations still dependent on manual work. In more complex multi-party payment flows, only 35% of firms use wallet or virtual account logic for fund flows, while 23% allocate funds entirely by hand.

Cross-border payouts stood out as an area of greater progress. Some 61% of UK firms said those payouts had been fully automated. However, the data also showed differences by scale, with companies processing fewer than 250 million transactions more likely to report full automation than those processing more than 500 million transactions.

Cost visibility

The research also highlighted limited visibility over foreign exchange charges. In the UK, 39% of companies said they only see FX costs after settlement, leaving them without a real-time view of a significant cross-border payment expense.

The issue appeared even more acute in the United States, where 47% of firms reported the same problem. Even so, the UK data points to a substantial share of large businesses operating without immediate oversight of one of their core payment costs.

Compliance remains another source of friction. Four in 10 UK respondents identified country-specific payout restrictions as a major challenge, underlining the difficulty of running payment operations across multiple markets while meeting different regulatory requirements.

The findings suggest regulation continues to shape how payment systems are built and managed, even as firms increase spending on digital tools. Rather than removing manual intervention altogether, newer systems often appear to sit alongside older workflows and fragmented processes.

Provider reliance

The data also pointed to concentration among payment suppliers. In the UK, 70% of platforms said they rely on a single provider to handle most payment flows, while 29% use multiple providers across different parts of the process.

Reliance on a single provider was higher in Germany, where 75% of firms reported relying on a single provider for most payment flows. This suggests many businesses have yet to adopt more diversified arrangements that could give them greater control over routing, costs and operational resilience.

At the same time, the survey indicates that many businesses are prioritising customer-facing changes over back-office reform. In the UK, 43% said they would consider new infrastructure to gain better control over refund flows, while 39% pointed to support for future financial services.

By comparison, 31% said they would consider new infrastructure to simplify compliance, enable faster settlement or improve visibility into fund flows. That gap suggests operational change may still struggle internally against initiatives that have a more direct effect on customers or on product expansion.

Censuswide conducted the research among 600 senior decision-makers across the UK, France, Germany and the United States. Respondents came from businesses with at least 250 employees and annual payment volumes of 50 million transactions or more, spanning sectors including eCommerce, travel, fintech, software-as-a-service, on-demand services, and crypto.

Andy Wiggan, Chief Product Officer at Mangopay, said the data showed that modernisation in payments had not fully reached the infrastructure layer.

“While automation and AI dominate industry narratives, our data shows that the underlying financial infrastructure has not kept pace. For many British firms, the reality is still defined by manual processes, limited visibility and operational complexity. Even where processes have been digitised to an extent, they are not always transparent or controllable,” said Wiggan.

“These challenges are particularly pronounced for platforms managing multi-party payments. For years, many platforms focused on user growth. Now, especially at the enterprise level, the focus is shifting to margins and financial control as the platform economy enters a monetisation phase. The next phase of transformation will be less about adopting new technology and more about rebuilding payment infrastructure to deliver control, transparency and scalability.”