How Marks & Spencer took control of reconciliation – and what retailers can learn
In an industry where volume, velocity, and visibility make or break financial operations, Marks & Spencer found themselves at a turning point.
The UK retail giant had recently expanded its payment options to include Visa, Mastercard, JCB, and American Express. That change brought convenience to customers, but for the finance team, it triggered a wave of reconciliation complexity.
Thousands of new transactions each week. A growing variety of payment formats. Legacy tools that couldn’t keep up. M&S needed a way to simplify and scale.
From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs
Subscribe to TRBAt the time, their reconciliation process was heavily manual. Excel sheets, Access databases, and homegrown systems were doing the heavy lifting, often with limited accuracy and slow turnaround. The finance team knew that as transaction volume grew, their systems couldn’t keep up.
So they made a bold move. They stepped back, assessed their reconciliation structure, and shifted their focus from reacting to investigating. That meant identifying mismatches faster, cutting down time spent chasing errors, and gaining better visibility at the store level.
The decision to partner with Trintech wasn’t just about replacing outdated tools. It was about rethinking reconciliation entirely. As Patrick Bishop, M&S’s user manager for business reconciliations, put it, “We went in with the feeling that they understood our reconciliation needs and came out with a completely different view on our approach”.
Store-Level Clarity at Scale
One of the big shifts? Moving from regional reconciliation to store-level reconciliation. That change alone helped M&S detect discrepancies faster and link issues directly to specific stores or banks. It reduced the time spent tracking down the root cause of errors and allowed teams to resolve issues quicker.
The new system now processes over 20,000 weekly entries across five data feeds, matching sales and refunds by card type against incoming bank statements. And it’s not just matching what’s there, it’s flagging what’s missing. That includes delayed bank credits, which previously may have gone unnoticed but now allow the finance team to act quickly and recover lost interest.
A custom integration with American Express’ EPA software added even more precision, allowing daily store-level matchbacks between point-of-sale data and EPA summaries.
As Helen Davies, Project Manager at M&S, put it:
“We are more in control of the information and payments from the bank. Timely reporting enables checking of bank credits, which means late credits are acted upon and we don’t lose out on interest. These factors have translated into significant cost-savings for M&S.”
Lessons for Retail Finance Teams
M&S’s experience highlights a few key takeaways for any retailer looking to modernize finance operations:
- Automate first, then optimize. They didn’t just digitize. they streamlined and rethought their approach to reconciliation.
- Drill down, don’t just scale up. Store-level reconciliation brought granularity that saved time and improved accuracy.
- Act on exceptions, not just process them. Moving from reaction to investigation allowed their team to be more proactive.
This wasn’t about installing software. It was about building a smarter, faster, more confident finance function.
Want to learn more about how top retail brands are transforming finance?
Check out our full interview with Kierian Davis on how Trintech helps retailers modernize finance for a deeper look at common challenges and smart solutions.
Also, don’t miss our latest webinar:
Watch now: Automate Payment Reconciliations For Retail
Trintech walk through the trends, tools, and tactics that are helping finance teams take control in today’s fast-moving retail environment.
