When Pollen Street Capital acquired Mattioli Woods and set a mandate for operational transformation, the leading UK wealth management company needed to automate its internal processes fast. Together with STX Next, the financial enterprise built an automated reconciliation platform on Azure and a unified data platform to drive reporting and M&A scalability.
Mattioli Woods is one of the UK's leading wealth management and employee benefits firms, serving more than 20,000 clients and managing over £16 billion in assets under management, administration, and advice. Founded in 1991, the firm has built a reputation for personalised, relationship-driven financial advice covering pension planning, investment management, tax strategy, and employee benefits.
Mattioli Woods grew significantly through a series of strategic acquisitions. In 2024, the firm was acquired by Pollen Street Capital, a private equity firm with a strong track record of investing in financial services businesses across Europe. That transition set in motion one of the most ambitious operational transformation programmes in the firm's history.
As Mattioli Woods absorbed multiple acquisitions and came under Pollen Street's governance, the scale of its back-office operations became increasingly complex to manage. At the heart of the challenge was the Annual Valuation Statement: a government-mandated report that every investor must receive each year, summarising what happened to their money over the year. To produce an accurate AVS, Mattioli Woods needed its internal account records (balances, cash flows, and balance sheet positions) to match the banks' records exactly. That made daily bank reconciliation foundational to the entire process. Get it wrong or slow, and everything downstream was compromised.
The reconciliation work itself sat with the CRM team. Every representative spent around half an hour each day manually matching transaction data from banks against records in the MWeb system, longer when data was missing, bank statements arrived late, or discrepancies needed chasing. Across a team of 200 people doing this every working day, that added up to more than 100 hours of manual reconciliation effort daily, and over 14,000 hours a year. There was no centralised system, no automated flow between the bank data sources, MWeb, and the ReconArt reconciliation engine. The process ran entirely on people.
Moreover, most of the existing processes lived only in the heads of the people who performed them, making reverse engineering the logic and translating it into software a foundational challenge in itself. The new private equity ownership brought high corporate standards and a clear directive: modernise operations, reduce manual workload, and build a scalable, automated reconciliation platform that a small team could manage. Now that the goal had been clearly defined, Mattioli Woods needed a trusted partner with proven experience in the enterprise-level financial sector, as well as expertise in cloud services, data engineering, and custom software development. STX Next perfectly met these requirements.
Saving over 14,000 Staff Hours Annually
STX Next took full ownership of the design, build, and delivery of ReconSync, a system that automates the end-to-end reconciliation data flow. This engagement expanded to include an embedded Scrum Master across three internal Mattioli Woods product teams, driving both the Agile transformation and the technical delivery.
ReconSync was designed as an Azure-native integration service connecting three previously siloed systems: the banks' transaction data sources, the internal transaction management platform, and the external reconciliation engine. The platform handles two primary data flows in sequence, without human intervention.
The Bank Data Collector operates on a predefined schedule, automatically pulling transaction files via bank APIs and SFTP interfaces. These files are securely consolidated and stored in Azure Blob Storage.
Simultaneously, the Internal Data Collector monitors Service Bus messages. When triggered by the transaction management platform, it retrieves the corresponding expected transaction records for the same period and places them into storage.
The System Communicator detects when both the banking and internal data sets are available in storage. It then transmits the complete batch to ReconArt, a third-party reconciliation platform that STX Next integrated into the flow, which handles the automated matching process.
Once the reconciliation engine finishes its analysis, the System Synchroniser polls for the completed report. It retrieves the matching results and delivers them back to the transaction management platform, effectively closing the loop and updating the records.
Alongside the technical build, a Scrum Master was embedded across Mattioli Woods' three internal product teams to introduce:
A few months after implementing Scrum and Agile practices:
The integration platform team moved from an unstructured backlog to 50-80% planned sprint delivery.
The transaction management team reached 80-90% delivery after Scrum ceremonies were introduced.
The Reconciliation team moved from 20% planned delivery to 50% within the first sprint cycle, with 80% in sight.
AI tools, including Claude, Avoma, Firefly, Notion AI, and Perplexity, were used to accelerate user story generation and sprint reporting.
The shift from a manual, people-heavy reconciliation process to an automated financial data platform had a concrete and measurable impact on Mattioli Woods' operations. A process that previously required a 200-person team to manage has been automated by a reconciliation system, with only a small team of 3 to 4 people monitoring it, freeing up the rest of the team to focus on more complex tasks.
14,000+ staff hours saved annually: the previous manual reconciliation process consumed a full working day each day across a large distributed team. With ReconSync, the same process completes in under two hours.
320,000+ bank transactions reconciled automatically per year, pulling data from five major banking partners without manual intervention.
What had been a daily task for 200 CRM team members was handed over to a dedicated reconciliation team of four, freeing the remaining 196 from manual matching work and returning their time to client-facing advisory tasks.
Reconciliation coverage achieved at 60-70% of total transaction volume at soft launch, with a clear path to full automation across all five banks.
Sprint delivery across the three product teams improved significantly: from near-zero structured delivery to 50-90% planned sprint completion, depending on the team and phase.
Roadmap stability improved by moving from daily ad hoc priority changes to stable sprint backlogs with pre-refined requirements ready for the following sprint.
When Pollen Street Capital acquired Mattioli Woods, the bar for operational efficiency was set higher than ever. The existing reconciliation process was a clear bottleneck, and we knew a simple patch wouldn't suffice. The system needed a complete overhaul.
STX Next stepped in to lead the design and development of a reconciliation automation platform. Simultaneously, our Scrum Master worked side-by-side with three of Mattioli Woods' internal teams to ensure that their operational readiness kept pace with the technologies they were implementing.
Our cooperation resulted in a cloud-native automation platform that has fundamentally changed how the firm operates:
For a wealth manager overseeing £16 billion in assets, this infrastructure is the foundation that makes their ambitious growth possible.
Schedule a call with our experts to discover the benefits of partnering with STX Next.
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