Case Study: The Football Association streamlines payments and reconciliations with Cognizant

The Football Association cuts payment onboarding to 2 weeks with Cognizant

The Football Association (The FA), the governing body for football in England, faced a challenge modernizing its fragmented payments ecosystem. A patchwork of legacy systems across The FA, its professional clubs, and County FAs resulted in significant manual work for finance teams, who spent hours each day reconciling payments from over 60 revenue streams. Partnering with Cognizant, The FA sought to eliminate this inefficiency and improve revenue visibility.

Cognizant designed and delivered a unified, cloud-native Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform using the Barclays Smartpay Fuse gateway. The solution automated invoicing, reconciliations, and accounting workflows. This transformation handled 666,742 transactions worth £84.3 million in its latest season, saving an estimated 500 manual hours per year for finance professionals and significantly accelerating revenue recognition for over 50 football organizations.

The Football Association (The FA)