The Evolution of Financial Data Control: A Conversation with AutoRek’s Nicholas Botha

By John San Filippo

Manual reconciliation remains a persistent challenge for many financial institutions, particularly in the credit union space. While tier-one banks have largely moved toward automated systems, many mid-tier and smaller institutions continue to rely on legacy manual processes that are prone to error and difficult to scale. AutoRek, a company with 30 years of experience in the industry, is working to modernize this aspect of the back office by providing an end-to-end financial data control platform.

Nicholas Botha, Global Payments Sales Manager for AutoRek, recently spoke with Finopotamus about the company’s history and its strategic focus on automating complex data environments.

Solving the Spreadsheet Dilemma

Nicholas Botha, Global Payments Sales Manager, AutoRek

AutoRek was founded three decades ago in Glasgow, Scotland, with a focus on resolving the inefficiencies inherent in manual financial management. The company’s growth has since led to the establishment of a formal legal entity in the United States, headquartered in New York City, to serve a growing roster of mid-to-enterprise clients.

“Our founders worked in a lot of manual spreadsheets around doing reconciliation and just thought there’s got to be a better way to do this,” Botha told Finopotamus.

In the credit union sector, the primary competition for automation is often the persistence of manual habits rather than other software providers, he explained. Many institutions, he added, still rely on tools that were not designed for the complexities of modern financial data. “They (credit unions) are probably doing a lot of their data management and reconciliation reporting activity on spreadsheets,” he noted. “Excel is probably our biggest competition.”

The Connective Tissue of the Tech Stack

The AutoRek platform is designed to act as a bridge between various systems within a financial institution, Botha said. Rather than requiring a complete overhaul of existing infrastructure, it integrates with a wide range of data sources to provide a unified view of financial activity, he added.

The software ingests data from ERP systems, core banking platforms, and third-party partners such as FedNow, Visa, and Mastercard. This allows for a high degree of oversight across multiple payment rails and transaction types.

“We’re looking to ingest all that data into our software to be able to perform the reconciliation in near real time and then identifying any discrepancies in the data and surfacing that to them,” Botha explained.

Scaling for Future Growth

For institutions looking to expand their product offerings or increase transaction volumes, manual processes often create a significant bottleneck. Automation allows these organizations to scale their operations without a corresponding increase in overhead costs.

“A credit union’s strategic direction could be to reduce costs, it could be to scale, or to grow more effectively and create operational efficiencies,” Botha said, adding that by moving away from manual data entry and verification, institutions can focus on strategic initiatives rather than basic operational maintenance. “The more volume they do, the less the cost becomes per transaction.”

Advanced AI and the ARIA Platform

AutoRek recently introduced a new layer of functionality through its artificial intelligence (AI) module, known as AutoRek ARIA. Built in-house with support from Microsoft, ARIA utilizes specialized “personas” to assist different departments with their specific needs, Botha said.

The platform includes personas for reconcilers, executives, and developers. The developer persona, in particular, is designed to significantly accelerate the implementation process, potentially reducing setup times from months to days. “What we’re foreseeing is in the future when I said it might take three to six months, it might take three to six weeks, or it might take three to six days to actually build out those solutions in our platform,” he asserted.

Prioritizing Ease of Implementation

A common concern for credit unions when considering new enterprise software is the potential strain on internal IT and engineering resources. Botha clarified that the AutoRek platform is designed to be managed by the finance and operations professionals who use it every day.

“A common misconception is that implementing a piece of software like this is going to have a heavy reliance on their engineering and technical resources,” he said. “Our system is targeted at the end users of the platform being able to use, configure, and build it out.”

The Strategic Necessity of Modernization

As the financial services industry becomes increasingly defined by technological capability, Botha emphasized that financial institutions must prioritize modernization to remain viable in the long term.

“Financial services firms are being run by technology, and I think that going forward, just even the short term, that needs to be the priority,” he observed. “We’ve seen so many success stories in financial services utilizing the benefits of technology and AI. If firms aren’t doing that, they won’t exist in the next five years.”