Hot on the heels of landmark US deals with Hachette and most recently Simon & Schuster, Batch comes to the London Book Fair amidst a turbocharged period of expansion - 25 years after its founding by the Booksellers Association, of which it remains a group company alongside National Book Tokens.
 
Announced to considerable fanfare at this year’s American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in Denver, Colorado - the new partnership with Simon & Schuster by Batch’s US arm Batch For Books completed the company’s Grand Slam of ‘Big 5’ US publishers, following Hachette US’ announcement earlier this year.
 
Founded in 2000, Batch (Booksellers Association Transaction Clearing House) succeeded the former manual clearing operation run by Book Tokens (relaunched as National Book Tokens in 2003) and took on its remit of streamlining payment processes - and consolidating communications  - between bookshops and suppliers to save both booksellers and publishers valuable time, administrative resource and operational cost.
 
Batch transitioned the manual cheque based payments operation into a technological solution and over time, to service the changing business needs of booksellers, became a solution provider: developing and managing a wider range of services, designed to streamline stock processing and data management, that enable booksellers of all sizes and locations to do business with UK and Irish suppliers as easily as possible.
 
Today, Batch has significantly diversified and refined its offering to bookshops in response to the evolving needs of booksellers, accelerating nature of technological advancement and global changes to supply chains. Alongside the core services of Batch Payments and Batch Returns - the latter recognised across the industry as the ‘go to’ system for returns - the more recently launched BatchLine POS remains the only stock management system in the industry to be run solely for the benefit of booksellers.
 
In partnership with 30 publishers and their hundreds of client publishers - covering the majority of the UK books trade,  one or more of Batch’s services are now used by hundreds of bookshops with Batch Payments now handling more than  £170 million across three currencies and an userbase now spanning 80 countries and counting. In a further testament to Batch’s commitment to excellence on all operational levels, their services have been awarded ISO/IEC certification - the globally recognised  standard for information security management systems  – first in 2013 and after a 2024 audit against new standards.
 
The latest success story in Batch’s short history is US arm Batch For Books’ rapid expansion. Set-up by former Batch Managing Director Fraser Tanner, and current CEO of the US Operation, Batch For Books is a rare example of a UK based, and founded, company finding and capitalising on a gap in the US book market. Starting strongly with day one signups by Penguin Random House, Macmillan and Harper Collins, Batch For Books today has a growing customer base of over already 450 bookshops using Batch Payments across the US.
 
Izzy Carlile, Managing Director of Batch said: ‘At Batch we pride ourselves on putting booksellers and their unique needs at the centre of all we do. Running a bookshop has never been easy and - in the current climate of rapid technological advancement, supply chain disruption and tightening financial margins – it’s not getting any easier. Therefore, we’re delighted that across the UK and Ireland - and now in the US and other locations around the world as well - we’re seeing more booksellers, supported by more suppliers and publishers,  using Batch services to lighten the administrative load, utilise technological solutions and give themselves back the valuable time they need to do what they do best; be vibrant cornerstones of their shopping destinations, beating hearts of their communities and essential curators of the creative industries.’
 
Meryl Halls, Managing Director of The Bookseller Association said: ‘At the Booksellers Association we always strive to help bookshops and booksellers by celebrating them to consumers, advocating them to governments and supporting them pastorally and operationally. Since its foundation, Batch has been at the strategic heart of the latter and a key long-term investment by the Booksellers Association in fortifying and strengthening operationally bookshops of all shapes and sizes, both presently and in the future, and now -  increasingly - across the globe and in the US.’