About
We built the fifth one so nobody has to build a sixth
Almost every payments company eventually writes its own reconciliation tool. It starts as a script, becomes a service, and ends up as four hundred lines of rules that one person understands and nobody wants to touch. We have each built one. Finlecy exists because that work should not be repeated at every company in Europe.
How this started
In 2022 our co-founders were on opposite sides of the same problem. One ran settlement operations at a Spanish acquirer and spent every month-end in a spreadsheet with eleven tabs. The other maintained the core ledger at a Portuguese digital bank and kept being asked why the ledger disagreed with the bank, when in most cases it did not — the two were simply describing the same movement in different vocabularies.
The conversation that led to Finlecy was about a single recurring break. One sending bank stripped hyphens from remittance references. That one behaviour generated around six hours of manual work every month, every month, for two years. Nobody had noticed, because nobody had ever aggregated the exception queue by cause.
That is the whole thesis. The hard part of reconciliation is not matching — it is understanding what did not match, well enough that the pattern becomes visible and someone can fix it upstream. Everything in the product follows from that.
We started in 2023, in a village in Guipúzcoa, which is an unusual place to build financial infrastructure and has turned out to suit the work. We are deliberately small, we take implementations ourselves rather than handing them to a partner, and we would rather tell a prospective customer that a spreadsheet is enough than sell them something they do not need.
- Founded
- 2023
- Based in
- Belauntza, Guipúzcoa
- Working across
- Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Benelux, DACH
- Team
- 5 people
- Languages
- English, Spanish, Basque, Portuguese
How we build
Five positions we do not compromise on
Each of these costs us something — a feature we cannot ship, a demo that looks less impressive, a deal we do not close. We hold them anyway, because reconciliation is a control and controls that bend are not controls.
Money is an integer
No floating-point representation of a balance, anywhere in the pipeline, including intermediate calculations. This is not pedantry. It is the difference between a system that reconciles and one that occasionally does not.
The model never decides
Every decision affecting a balance is made by deterministic code. Language models read, classify and explain. The moment a model is allowed to assert a match, the output stops being reproducible, and reconciliation that cannot be reproduced is not reconciliation.
Refuse rather than guess
Where the evidence is ambiguous, the honest output is 'multiple candidates, human required'. A system that returns nothing is recoverable. One that confidently returns the wrong batch is not.
An explanation is part of the answer
A break without a reason is an investigation. A break with a reason, evidence and a drafted entry is a decision. The second one takes three minutes and the first one takes twenty.
Build for the conversation in eighteen months
Someone will eventually ask what was known on a specific day and who decided what to do about it. Everything we build assumes that question is coming.
If any of these sound like the opposite of how your current tooling behaves, that is the conversation worth having.
People
Who you will actually deal with
Small enough that the person who builds the parser is the person who answers when it misreads your file.
Ane Etxeberria
Co-founder, Chief Executive
Ran reconciliation and settlement operations for a Spanish acquirer for nine years, including the two years it spent migrating to ISO 20022. Started Finlecy after building the fourth internal matching tool of a career and concluding that nobody should have to build a fifth.
Rubén Ferreira
Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer
Built and operated the core ledger at a Portuguese digital bank through its licence application and first regulatory examination. Holds the view, unpopular in some circles, that money should never be represented as a floating-point number.
Klara Nowak
Head of Product
A financial controller before a product manager, which shows. Owns the reason-code library and the rule that no exception ships without an explanation a new analyst could act on unaided.
Mikel Aranburu
Founding Engineer, Formats
Has read more camt.053 files than is advisable and maintains the parser suite that turns them into something usable. Writes the format engine's failure messages personally, on the grounds that a bad error message costs an operator an hour.
Sofia Marchetti
Head of Customer Engineering
Leads implementations, which at Finlecy means sitting with a team's real data until the parallel run agrees with their existing process. Has never once shipped a configuration built from a questionnaire instead of a file.
The next one
We hire slowly and we hire people who have done the work. If you have run a reconciliation function, or built the tooling for one, we would like to hear from you.
hello@finlecy.comWorking on the same problem?
We are always interested in talking to people who have built reconciliation from the inside — whether or not there is a job open.