How Matchbox helps to reduce the costs of electronic payments

4 July 2023

Swiss chocolate manufacturer Läderach not only uses Matchbox to automate electronic payment reconciliation: it also used Matchbox’s payment analytics function to ensure it was perfectly prepared for negotiations with its acquirer Adyen – with impressive results!

Content of the article

The customer

Läderach is a premium manufacturer of Switzerland’s finest, hand-made chocolate. The Swiss company now employs 1’700 people around the world and operates 150 boutiques in 17 countries.

The challenge

Läderach has enjoyed strong international growth over the last few years. In 2021 alone, the number of boutiques worldwide rose from 80 to 120. Läderach has had to automate a lot of processes to handle growth of this magnitude with its existing and new staff. For Läderach’s accountants in particular, the corresponding rise in the number of transactions has of course substantially increased the workload.

The company has already been using Matchbox from treibauf for automatic reconciliation of cashless payments for many years. Läderach’s goal was to increase the automated matching rate to over 99% (!).

Achieving this goal and thus increasing the level of automation even further requires high-quality acquirer data. Läderach has worked with two different acquirers to date, which varied widely in terms of the quality of the supplied data.

In order to increase the level of automation, Läderach decided to process all payments through Adyen, as the company can deliver the optimal data pool for this.

Just one acquirer – and still Matchbox?

Some retail companies think you don’t need any reconciliation software if you’re only working with a single acquirer. They assume the acquirer provides a list of all transactions. Some acquirers even claim that reconciliation is included in their range of services.

If you delve a little deeper though, you realise that an acquirer can only ever reveal its ‘own’ side: because the acquirer doesn’t have the information tracked by the retail company’s tills. True reconciliation of electronic payments can only occur when the self-tracked data is compared to the data supplied by the acquirer: that’s precisely what Matchbox does!

The solution

Good preparation meant having the right data in the first place: which cards were used where? What fees were incurred with the different acquirers? How high was turnover in the individual branches and in the different countries? And what share of total turnover did specific cards account for?

The Payment-Analytics-Center from Matchbox supplies the right answers: with intelligent preparation of all data, this feature of the software facilitates precise insights into the composition of and fees for all payments – creating valuable transparency over costs and payment structures in the process.

This meant IT Project Manager Nico Sterner was able to save a lot of time on preparation: he obtained all the relevant figures and data for the forthcoming negotiations virtually at the touch of a button.

The result

Läderach’s stated goal was to increase the automated matching rate to over 99% (!) of all payments made electronically. The rate was already 98% at the outset. Achieving this goal required close cooperation between Läderach and treibauf. The treibauf team were on hand to offer advice and support to the Läderach IT team, to boost the level of automation step by step.

«Matchbox automates reconciliation of our electronic payments and facilitates a leaner infrastructure for us accordingly. We also have faster access to the relevant figures for our acquirer negotiations: in 2023 we’re saving 7% on acquirer fees and have also been able to increase our matching rate even further.»

Nico Sterner
IT Business Solutions Manager, Läderach AG

Why treibauf?

«Läderach»
Läderach (Schweiz) AG is a company based in the canton of Glarus that produces chocolates and confections.

Nicolas Schwotzer

Nicolas is the Chief Product Owner, a member of the treibauf Executive Board and founded our company more than 25 years ago. Thanks to this wealth of experience, he is one of the most important experts in reconciliation software and POS integration.

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