Mind the Data Gap: Banking Solutions for Easier Reconciliation
28 August 2025
Reading time: 4 min
In a fast-changing world, new opportunities appear every day—but so do the challenges that make daily processes more complex. For treasury teams, keeping full insight and control gets harder when data is fragmented and resources are limited. Staying up to date with your days sales outstanding (DSO) and cash position can help your business thrive. And while easy and seamless reconciliation of your bank transactions is essential, it remains one of the most pressing challenges. In this article, we’ll explore how banking solutions can help close the data and resource gap—empowering your team to reconcile more efficiently and with greater control.
Reconciliation, a task that needs to be done
In today’s digital operations, reconciliation is a critical function that ensures accuracy, compliance, and trust. But when data is incomplete and tools fall short, your automatic match rate stays low. For treasury teams, that means less insight and more manual work.
Resolving unmatched positions quickly is essential, yet manual matching takes time and slows down information processing. The result? Higher costs, less control, and more pressure on your team.
Integrating banking solutions into daily operations can help you to overcome data limitations, reduce manual workload and improve overall control. Here's how:
Solid foundation with automated data exchange
Your digital roadmap toward increasing straight through processing (STP) of bank transaction reconciliation starts with direct connectivity between you and your bank. Automating the data exchange decreases the number of errors and manual interactions with your banking partners.
Increased process efficiency, faster payments and reporting tasks, enhanced security and better data integration are just a few benefits of adopting a direct connectivity such as a host-to-host solution. When choosing a universal solution, you will obtain a single point of access to all your banks and will be able to reduce the usage of many proprietary platforms.
Unlock the value of available data
With current market developments information is becoming more accessible. It is expected that the adoption of Opens in a new tabISO 20022 will eventually allow companies to improve their reconciliation process. To what extent and when, will largely depend on the ability of both corporates and their banks to provide and process additional information.
It also depends on you and your actions, and you can start now. Start looking into your processes, start dialogues with your counterparties and banks on the information required to streamline the payments ecosystem. Find out what information you are missing, how that impacts your relationships with customers and suppliers.
For example, by choosing reporting in .xml format you will benefit from structured data that can resolve your issues with disordered information and further increase the STP ratio of your reconciliation. The latest version of the Opens in a new tabISO 20022 standard provides fields for additional details that could, in the future, allow you to increase the scope of information feeding in your systems.
While leveraging the full potential of available data is an important first step towards improvement, it is not enough when data is simply missing.
Tools for smarter reconciliation
When analysing your information gaps, you will probably look at the main issues which significantly impact the speed of reconciliation process or workload generated. There are solutions that can help you with bottlenecks in processes when the standard way of working for some reason falls short. Even though these will not address the entire flow, they can still ease your workload, reduce manual tasks and improve efficiency.
For example, a common issue may be the lack of required data in recurring incoming payments from specific business customers. One effective solution is to use a unique identifier to distinguish payment flows. An account number (IBAN) can be such an identifier. Then, instead of relying on the data input provided by the payer, you can distinguish flows based on the account’s number to which the funds were credited.
When these accounts are part of Virtual Bank Account (VBA) solution structure, companies can simultaneously automate cash concentration. Incoming funds posted to the VBA are swept to the header account almost in real time, maintaining a zero balance on the individual VBAs yet enabling easy tracking of the funds route. This allows you to retain the benefit of enhanced visibility and control with greater accuracy, speed of reconciliation and reduced manual post-processing of unmatched items.
You can also consider using a solution that provides an option to automatically assign flows based on string recognition. At ING you can use Virtual Ledger Account which is a fully digital product that allows you to allocate funds based on pre-defined parameters. Thus, while limiting the number of physical accounts and keeping your bank account structure simple, you can benefit from enhanced reporting and reconciliation.
Alternatively, there are solutions such as SEPA Direct Debit and online payments that by design allow for increasing automated data matching versus standard payments. For multiple counterparties, using a SEPA Direct Debit collection method ensures straightforward and automated reconciliation of received payments. It also provides additional value for your clients, as it offers a convenient and automated way to pay suppliers.
By offering online payment options, you provide customers with more flexibility while also ensuring the necessary details for automated reconciliation. This is especially useful when payments are delayed or when automated methods like direct debit fail due to insufficient funds. In these cases, online payments are helping you avoid manual transaction tracking and support a smoother reconciliation process.
Back to reality
These are only examples of challenges corporates may face in their day-to-day operations. The toolkit depends on the available software and needs to be adjusted to your business model, treasury set-up and other needs that impact reconciliation processes. Nevertheless, you can improve the efficiency of your business processes by taking a few key steps. These include streamlining data exchange, managing data more effectively, and filling process gaps with ready-to-use tools
Timely reconciliation not only improves the STP ratio of matched flows but also helps optimise DSO, better customer relationships management, with client satisfaction being an important business metric, more accurate input to your cash flow forecasting model, increase in control and data insights, and better credit and liquidity risk management.
Reach out to your Transaction Services contact person to learn more on how we can help you achieve more with less by leveraging digital and automated solutions.
Loret Temmerman
Global Head Accounts and Cash Management
Saskia van Loon
PCM Value Proposition Manager
