Global payments infrastructure company Mangopay has revealed a striking gap between industry rhetoric and reality: despite years of investment in AI and digital transformation, the majority of UK businesses processing high volumes of transactions remain stuck in manual, fragmented, and low-visibility payment operations.
The findings come from a March 2026 survey of 600 senior finance and payments leaders across the UK, US, France, and Germany, all at companies processing at least 50 million transactions per year.
In the UK, 85% of firms still rely on fully or mostly manual reconciliation. For complex multi-party payments, only 35% use wallet or virtual account logic for fund flows, and nearly 1 in 4 firms allocate funds entirely by hand.
FX visibility, often cited as a flagship benefit of modern payment infrastructure, remains elusive. In the UK, 39% of firms only discover their FX costs after settlement, meaning almost 4 in 10 businesses are flying blind on one of their biggest cost drivers. In the US, that figure rises to nearly half (47%).
Infrastructure concentration compounds the problem. Some 70% of UK platforms lean on a single provider to handle most of their payment flows, with only 29% distributing across multiple providers. In Germany, dependency is even higher at 75%.
Cross-border payouts stand out as a genuine bright spot: 61% of UK firms have fully automated this function. Interestingly, smaller-volume businesses (under 250 million transactions) are more likely to be fully automated here (100%) than their larger counterparts processing over 500 million transactions (59%), suggesting that scale can introduce complexity that slows progress.
Compliance pressure is also anchoring teams to manual workflows. Some 40% of UK firms cite country-specific payout restrictions as a major operational challenge, underscoring that regulation continues to outpace technical solutions.
Despite these internal pain points, businesses are prioritising the front end over the back end. Around 43% would consider new infrastructure for better refund flow control, and 39% for future financial services support. By contrast, just 31% would invest in new infrastructure to simplify compliance or gain faster settlement visibility — a sign that operational reform remains undervalued at the board level.
“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. And even where processes have been ‘digitised’ to an extent, they are still not always transparent or controllable.
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 more on margins and financial control as the platform economy enters a monetisation phase. As such, we believe that the next phase of transformation will be less about adopting new technology and more about rebuilding payment infrastructure to deliver control, transparency, and scalability.”
Andy Wiggan, CPO of Mangopay
