Kani Payments has been named Payments Compliance Technology of the Year at the 2025 Payments Awards for its Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC reporting solution.

The recognition marks back-to-back category wins for Kani, cementing its position as the industry’s most trusted platform for card scheme reporting, audit-ready reconciliation and standards-driven compliance automation.

The judges recognised the pace at which Kani has advanced the category it won in 2024. What began as the leading QMR and GOC automation engine has expanded into a broader compliance infrastructure layer—one that now defines, measures and improves the data quality underpinning scheme and regulatory reporting across the payments ecosystem.

Aaron Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Kani Payments, said:

“This award means a great deal because it reflects not just where we are today, but how far we’ve pushed the industry forward over the last year. Our team has worked relentlessly to make compliance simpler, faster and more transparent for issuers, acquirers and EMIs. Retaining this award is a testament to the impact that work is having across the ecosystem.”

Raising the bar since last year’s win

Since its 2024 victory, Kani has introduced a series of developments that strengthened its position as the go-to compliance and reporting engine for payment firms:

The Kani Data Scorecard

Launched in early 2025, the Scorecard is the first benchmarking framework that objectively measures processor data quality against reconciliation, compliance and fraud-readiness standards.

Having assessed data from more than 30 processors—including major issuer-processors and challenger bank providers—the Scorecard revealed that 70% fell short of core standards due to gaps such as missing lifecycle fields, mislabelled currencies and inconsistent regional data.

The Scorecard findings have since been featured in the Financial Times’ Banking Risk & Regulation and is now setting a new benchmark for what clean, compliance-grade payments data should look like.

Record Matching: Next-generation data traceability

Kani’s new Record Matching feature gives compliance and finance teams a way to maintain auditability at scale, even across complex and competing datasets. It intelligently matches transactions across multiple internal and external data sources—even when no clean identifiers exist—and builds a fully traceable chain of evidence from source to outcome.

As firms prepare for the FCA’s enhanced safeguarding requirements, Record Matching provides a critical capability for analysing, verifying and reconciling data with confidence.

Reconciliation Snapshot: Evidence on demand

Introduced this year, Snapshot lets teams instantly generate and schedule tamper-proof reconciliation exports, complete with custom views and automated delivery. It’s already supporting clients through safeguarding audits, reviews and scheme-related oversight.

Proven impact across the industry

The win comes off the back of a standout year for Kani, marked by strong client growth, platform expansion and increasing industry recognition.

Over the past 18 months, Kani has:

• Expanded active users across the UK, Europe and APAC
• Achieved 100% retention across all QMR/GOC deployments
• Grown its client base by double digits
• Delivered 100% Mastercard and Visa formatting compliance across every submission
• Been recognised by The Digital Banker, Banking Risk & Regulation and the Brit FinTech Awards for raising the industry standard on payments data quality and compliance
• Introduced new capabilities—including the Data Scorecard, Record Linkage and Reconciliation Snapshot—that strengthen the industry’s compliance infrastructure

Defending champions for a reason

As regulatory expectations rise and data complexity increases, compliance has become as much a data-quality challenge as a reporting one. Kani’s platform tackles both—automating the hard, overlooked work that sits beneath every QMR, GOC or regulatory submission.

By retaining this award, Kani is reaffirming its role as the standards-setter in payments compliance: a platform built on transparency, traceability and technical rigour, now shaping the future of how payment firms evidence control.

Kani’s team remains focused on the next frontier, defining the data standards and automation layers the industry will rely on in 2026 and beyond.

About Kani Payments

Kani is the payments industry’s reconciliation, reporting and compliance engine. The platform unifies data from any processor, bank or internal system; standardises it to pre-defined rules; and produces audit-ready outputs for card schemes, regulators and finance teams. Trusted by issuers, acquirers, PSPs and digital banks across the UK, Europe and APAC, Kani is setting the benchmark for clean, transparent and standards-driven payments data.

Kani Payments has been named a finalist in two categories at the prestigious Banking Tech Awards 2025, organised by FinTech Futures:

• Best Digital Solution Provider – RegTech
• UK PayTech of the Year

Now in their latest edition, the Banking Tech Awards celebrate excellence and innovation across the global financial technology landscape. Run by FinTech Futures, a leading fintech media brand, the awards spotlight the organisations and individuals driving real impact in banking and payments.

These nominations recognise Kani’s continued commitment to solving some of the most complex data challenges in the industry—helping payment providers, issuers and EMIs stay compliant, automate back-office operations and scale with clarity and control.

Transforming regulatory reporting and reconciliation in payments

Kani’s award-nominated RegTech solution enables issuers and acquirers to automate complex card scheme reporting obligations, including Mastercard’s QMR and Visa’s GOC submissions. By ingesting, cleansing and standardising data from over 30 payment processors, the platform eliminates manual work and ensures 100% formatting compliance with scheme standards.

The platform’s no-code interface, pre-configured templates and real-time validation engine help reduce reporting cycles from weeks to minutes—removing the risk of submission errors, fines or reputational damage. With full auditability and end-to-end automation, it’s a proven solution for institutions facing rising regulatory expectations.

Meanwhile, Kani’s broader reconciliation and reporting suite has become essential infrastructure for payments businesses navigating fragmented data, manual processes and the increasing pace of real-time transactions. As the industry moves toward continuous compliance and instant insight, Kani provides the automation layer needed to scale confidently.

This nomination for UK PayTech of the Year comes at a time of strong momentum for Kani. In the past year, we’ve secured Series A funding, welcomed 10 new clients, expanded our global footprint and been recognised with multiple awards—including FinTech of the Year at the Brit FinTech Awards and Best Data & Analytics Initiative by The Digital Banker.

About Kani Payments

Founded in 2018, Kani is a purpose-built data reconciliation, reporting and compliance platform for the global payments industry. Live with fintechs, banks and processors across five continents, Kani turns complex multi-source transaction data into accurate, actionable insights and audit-ready reports. The platform supports reconciliation, operational finance, regulatory submissions and real-time analytics—helping clients reduce manual overhead, improve compliance and make smarter decisions at scale.

Originally featured in Silicon Valleys Journal, Kani’s Chief Technology Officer Panos Savvas explores the role of data, infrastructure, and automation in helping financial institutions manage the shift to real-time, high-volume digital transactions.

Over the past decade, the payments ecosystem has evolved from a linear chain of banks, schemes and acquirers into a sprawling web of fintechs, wallets, embedded finance providers, crypto gateways and cross-border platforms.

The shift from cash to digital has been dramatic. In many markets, the majority of transactions are now digital, fast and near-continuous. What used to be a deliberate purchase is now part of an always-on stream of low-friction payments. That behavioural change has multiplied transaction volumes many times over and reshaped how the entire system operates.

Payment providers today must manage massive data flows, growing technical complexity, and rising customer expectations—all while maintaining performance and uptime. In this environment, the margin for error has never been tighter.

Data fragmentation and the race to keep up

As the ecosystem expands, so do its data problems. Each processor, wallet and scheme brings its own file formats, naming conventions, and reconciliation logic. Aligning these in real time, across currencies and compliance frameworks, is a significant operational challenge.

Reconciliation was once a manual task, with analysts digging through spreadsheets and matching by eye. That model no longer scales. The industry is moving toward machine-to-machine reconciliation—systems that identify and resolve discrepancies automatically, with humans focused on exceptions and oversight.

This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about resilience. When errors cost time, money and reputation, automated reconciliation becomes a strategic advantage.

Meanwhile, compliance is only getting harder. Regulatory frameworks—from PSD2 in Europe to data localisation laws in Asia—increasingly overlap. Keeping pace requires a data foundation that’s both flexible and audit-ready.

That’s why so much of what we do at Kani focuses on untangling the complexity behind payments data. By simplifying and standardising fragmented inputs, our clients can automate reconciliation, accelerate reporting, and trust their numbers—no matter the source.

Innovation brings power… and pressure

Real-time payments, embedded finance and digital wallets have brought speed, access and convenience to billions of users. They’ve also introduced new layers of complexity.

Each new payment method carries its own settlement rules, data structures and compliance requirements. Multiply that across regions and providers, and operational overhead can spiral.

Online retail trends have amplified this further. With fewer in-store checkouts and rising confidence in online security, the volume of small, frequent, data-rich transactions continues to climb—each carrying its own operational and regulatory weight.

AI in payments: old tools, new terrain

AI has long played a role in payments—particularly in fraud detection and transaction monitoring. But its role is expanding fast.

Beyond fraud, AI is increasingly being used for reconciliation, anomaly detection, and predictive compliance. Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems offer new potential in data normalisation and exception handling—reducing unmatched records and enabling more responsive operations.

That potential comes with risk. Generative AI models are prone to hallucinations and can be manipulated by adversarial inputs. In payments, where precision is non-negotiable, that’s a serious concern.

The challenge is to deploy AI responsibly: with clear guardrails, transparency, and human oversight. When applied thoughtfully, these tools can elevate payments infrastructure to a new level. But only if the underlying data is accurate, consistent and traceable.

Beyond AI: the invisible infrastructure shift

While AI takes the spotlight, other technologies are quietly reshaping the rails beneath. Cloud-native architectures are enabling elastic scalability. Distributed ledger technologies are opening up new possibilities for settlement, transparency and programmable control.

But the central challenge remains unchanged: understanding the truth in the data.

Platforms that can ingest, reconcile, and analyse payments data in real time—then feed that intelligence back into operational and compliance systems — will define the next generation of financial operations. Autonomous reporting and reconciliation won’t just be possible; they’ll be expected.

Looking ahead

What’s most exciting about the next phase of payments isn’t just the speed or scale. It’s the convergence of automation, data intelligence and interoperability—and what that makes possible.

Data is no longer a by-product of payments. It’s the engine behind decision-making, compliance and growth. But with more providers entering the ecosystem, maintaining standards and trust becomes a collective challenge.

In the years ahead, the winners in payments won’t be defined solely by innovation or market share. It all comes down to how well they manage complexity at scale.

Get that right, and we won’t just have faster payments. We’ll have smarter, safer, more resilient infrastructure—capable of supporting global commerce in real time.

About Kani Payments
Kani is an award-winning SaaS platform providing automated data reconciliation, reporting and compliance solutions to payments and fintech companies. Founded by payments experts, their solutions are built specifically for the nuances of transaction data—from processor files and scheme reports to multi-currency settlement flows.

Kani Payments has been shortlisted for the 2025 FF Awards in the Real-Time Payments category—recognising our continued innovation in delivering fast, accurate and scalable payments reconciliation solutions.

Now in their landmark 2025 edition, the FF Awards are recognised across the global fintech sector for celebrating genuine excellence in financial services, where entries are judged purely on innovation and impact. Finalists were selected through public voting by FF News subscribers, with winners to be announced at a live ceremony on 25th November 2025 at Old Billingsgate, London.

We’re proud to be named alongside fellow innovators pushing the boundaries of real-time infrastructure, compliance and operational excellence.

Real-time payments, real-time reconciliation

Kani helps payments businesses make sense of their data in real time. Our platform is purpose-built to reconcile high-volume, multi-source transaction flows across issuers, acquirers, schemes and processors—with real-time logic, automated exception handling and full audit traceability baked in.

With the rise of real-time payments, reconciliation must evolve from an end-of-day process to an always-on, always-accurate control mechanism. Kani’s reconciliation engine processes transaction data as it lands, enabling faster reporting, instant exception alerts and continuous compliance across complex payment environments.

From instant card transactions to real-time settlement data, we provide a unified view that removes manual overhead, strengthens financial control and gives teams confidence in their numbers.

Whether it’s scheme reporting, operational finance or transaction monitoring, our tools help firms stay ahead in a world where real-time expectations are now the baseline.

This nomination comes during a standout year for Kani, having already been named FinTech of the Year at the Brit FinTech Awards and awarded Best Data & Analytics Initiative by The Digital Banker.

With growing regulatory demands and rising transaction volumes, more organisations are turning to Kani to help them automate reconciliation, reduce risk and unlock real-time insight from their payments data.

Want to learn more about Kani’s reconciliation solutions?

Book a demo or see how our automated platform can support your payments business

Aaron Holmes, founder and CEO of Kani Payments, has been recognised as a One to Watch in the LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme for 2025, featured in The Times.

Now in its eighth year, the programme is run by LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group, in partnership with The Times, and celebrates the UK’s most inspiring entrepreneurs driving growth, creating jobs and shaping the future of British business.

Out of nearly 700 nominations received this year, Aaron was selected as one of just 17 Ones to Watch—leaders who are making significant progress and scaling their businesses with vision, resilience and impact.

“This is a personal honour, but it also reflects the strength of the team behind Kani. I’ve worked in payments for over two decades, and I’ve never been more excited about the opportunities in front of us or more grateful to be solving real problems for our clients every day.”

Aaron Holmes, CEO & Founder, Kani Payments

With more than 20 years in the payments industry, Aaron played a leading role in launching the UK’s first contactless cards in 2008. In 2018, he founded Kani Payments to tackle the operational challenges around reconciliation, reporting and payments data quality—the very same issues he experienced first-hand while scaling fintech and financial services businesses.

Today, Kani helps clients across the payments ecosystem (from issuers and acquirers to schemes and fintechs) transform fragmented transaction data into clear, audit-ready reporting and insights.

This recognition comes at a time of rapid growth for Kani, as it continues to expand its platform, team and customer base across Europe and beyond.

“This year’s Ones to Watch are leaders who excel in their fields, create a positive impact on their customers and employees, and stand out for their potential to reach even greater success in the years ahead.”

John Garner, Managing Partner at LDC

As Kani continues to grow, the company remains focused on delivering best-in-class automated reconciliation solutions to the payments sector. Its platform transforms complex transaction data into accurate, audit-ready outputs—helping clients streamline operations, improve data quality and stay ahead of compliance demands.

Kani Payments has been named FinTech of the Year 2025 at the Brit FinTech Awards—recognising our work in automating reconciliation, reporting and compliance across the payments and fintech sectors.

The judges praised Kani for delivering these capabilities at speed and scale, enabling financial institutions to streamline operations, reduce risk and maintain control as they grow.

“This award is a huge honour and reflects the belief our clients place in our platform every day. It’s a proud moment for the team and for everyone working to solve complexity in payments.”

Aaron Holmes, CEO & Co-founder, Kani Payments

The Brit FinTech Awards highlighted Kani’s ability to turn traditionally complex back-office operations into a strategic advantage. By combining automation, scalability and deep industry expertise, the platform helps clients reconcile transactions meet compliance requirements and surface insights—all from a single, secure data foundation.

The judges recognised Kani for delivering meaningful impact at scale, with a solution trusted by global clients operating across high-volume, multi-currency payment environments.

Enabling smarter, scalable finance operations

Kani’s platform helps fintechs, issuers, EMIs and acquirers manage fragmented payments data with clarity and control. By automating key back-office processes—from high-volume reconciliation to compliance reporting—Kani helps teams reduce manual effort, accelerate reporting and uncover operational insights that drive better decisions.

Today, Kani is live with customers across five continents, supporting reconciliation and reporting across a growing ecosystem of schemes, processors and partners.

Raising standards across the ecosystem

Recent awards momentum comes off the back of a highly successful year for Kani. In 2025 alone, we’ve been recognised with Best Data & Analytics Initiative at the Global Cards & Payments Innovation Awards, nominated for Best Compliance Solution at the Payments Awards and featured in the Financial Times’ Banking Risk & Regulation for our Data Scorecard initiative.

We also welcomed a number of major new clients across fintech, travel and issuer processing—including Swiipr and Cardaq—further expanding our global reach and demonstrating the growing demand for robust, automated payments infrastructure.

Want to know more?

Explore Kani’s reconciliation, reporting and analytics solutions or schedule a demo directly

Originally featured in Finextra, Kani CEO and founder Aaron Holmes reflects on how the payments industry has changed and why data clarity remains one of the biggest challenges facing fintechs today.

From manual chaos to data clarity

When I first entered the payments space nearly two decades ago, reconciliation was a manual slog. Teams were buried in spreadsheets, tracing transactions and hunting mismatches—often for days at a time. What should have been straightforward was anything but.

Technology has moved on, but the core issue remains: payments data is messy, fragmented and hard to trust.

Solving the data problem means treating raw inputs not just as information, but as infrastructure. When data is standardised, complete and traceable, it stops being a blocker and becomes a platform—one that enables lightning-fast reconciliation, confident reporting and iron-clad compliance at scale.

The root problem: fragmented, ambiguous data

Payments data rarely arrives clean or consistent. It comes from banks, processors, schemes and acquirers—each with their own formats, field names and definitions. One file says “settled,” another says “cleared,” a third says “posted.”

Same action, different terms. Or worse: different actions described the same way.

Multiply this across partners, currencies and time zones, and you’re facing a reconciliation puzzle before you’ve even begun.

The cost? Missed revenue. Compliance gaps. Reputational risk. And with fintechs scaling fast and regulation tightening, the stakes have never been higher.

The myth of matching

There’s a common misconception that reconciliation is all about matching numbers.

In reality, the hard work happens long before that. You need to clean the data, structure it and understand what it’s really telling you long before any reconciliation takes place.

We’ve worked with companies of every shape and size, and the story’s always the same: messy data is the biggest blocker.

That’s why we built Kani to focus first on transforming data. Once the groundwork’s solid, matching, reporting and analytics flow naturally.

New pressures: speed and scrutiny

The environment today is very different from when I started.

We’ve moved from monthly reports to real-time expectations. Customers want instant updates. Regulators demand timely submissions. Finance teams need live visibility to make confident decisions.

To meet these rising demands, the data itself needs to be up to the task. Speed means nothing if the inputs are flawed. Without a solid foundation, even the most advanced systems will fail under pressure.

Why clean data changes everything

A solid data foundation is the difference between barely coping and operating at scale. When your data is structured, validated and complete, you can:

• Reconcile transactions in hours instead of days
• Trigger reports without wrangling formats
• Trace any record, across any partner, at any time
• Flag anomalies before they turn into real problems

Clean data unlocks operational clarity. It means fewer surprises, faster cycles and the confidence to make decisions without looking over your shoulder.

That’s why I founded Kani: to help teams stop firefighting and start building systems they can actually rely on.

What’s next: clarity at scale

Payments is evolving fast. Embedded finance, AI and decentralised systems are reshaping the space daily.

With complexity rising, we’re:

• Investing in smarter anomaly detection
• Expanding our integrations
• Co-creating tools with clients that solve real-world problems

But whatever changes, our mission stays the same: clarity.

Because when your data’s clear, your business flows better. You move faster. Make smarter decisions. And build the kind of trust that keeps the system running smoothly.

At Kani, we’re building the infrastructure that turns payments data from a liability into an advantage. By automating reconciliation, reporting and analytics, we help fintechs and issuers move faster, stay compliant and scale with clarity.

Want to find out more? Book a demo here

Kani Payments, the UK-based provider of reconciliation, reporting and analytics software to the payments sector, has been named winner of The Digital Banker’s Best Data & Analytics Initiative at the Global Cards & Payments Innovation Awards 2025.

The award recognises Kani’s Data Scorecard: an independent, objective assessment that sets a new benchmark for payments data quality across reconciliation, regulatory and operational standards.

The Digital Banker highlighted Kani’s automated reconciliation engine, comprehensive reporting suite and the ability to generate real-time, executive‑grade insights across the payment lifecycle—helping clients uncover opportunities, control costs and monitor performance across channels.

Crucially, the judges noted that the Data Scorecard solves the pervasive, industry‑wide problem of poor‑quality payments data by scoring datasets for completeness, accuracy and compliance‑readiness and flagging the gaps that compromise reconciliation, compliance and fraud oversight.

“Payments run on data. This award recognises the hard work our team has put into helping the industry raise its standards. With the Data Scorecard, we give processors, issuers and acquirers a clear, evidence‑based path to cleaner data and all the downstream benefits: faster reconciliation, easier reporting and enhanced fraud oversight.”

Aaron Holmes, CEO & Co‑founder, Kani Payments

What is Kani’s Data Scorecard?

The Kani Data Scorecard is a structured quality evaluation that measures payments data against best‑practice criteria across three pillars:

Completeness — Are all required fields present and consistently populated?

Accuracy — Do values reconcile across sources and align to scheme definitions?

Compliance‑readiness — Is the dataset normalised and traceable for regulatory, scheme and audit requirements?

Each assessment outputs an executive‑ready score, a detailed map of issues by field/category and a prioritised remediation plan that engineering and operations teams can action.

Since 2023, the Scorecard has been applied across 31+ processors and programme types, giving firms a fast, independent way to baseline data quality, track improvements over time and evidence control to stakeholders.

Why data quality matters

Poor‑quality data slows reconciliation, inflates operational cost and risk, and weakens compliance and fraud‑readiness. By making quality measurable and actionable, the Scorecard helps teams:

• Streamline payment reconciliation from end to end and reduce exceptions
• Shorten reporting cycles to schemes and regulators
• Improve fraud monitoring with cleaner, normalised inputs
• Cut downstream data engineering rework
• Evidence data governance to customers and auditors

A recognition of industry impact

This recognition from The Digital Banker reflects Kani’s mission to elevate the quality of payments data so that reconciliation, reporting and analytics become faster, safer and more insightful for everyone across the ecosystem.

Originally featured in FinTech Profile, this Q&A with Kani CEO & Co-founder Aaron Holmes covers Kani’s origin and mission, his day-to-day and predictions for the payments industry.

Who are you and what’s your background?

I’m Aaron Holmes, CEO and Co-founder of Kani Payments, a fintech based in Newcastle that helps payments companies make sense of their data—specifically around reconciliation, reporting and regulatory compliance.

Before Kani, I held leadership and operational roles across both high-growth fintechs and established institutions—from Thredd in London to Flex-e-Card and Newcastle Building Society. Most of my career was spent deep in payments operations: building reconciliation logic, managing scheme submissions and being the person ultimately responsible for getting the numbers right.

I started Kani in 2018 to fix the problems I’d been dealing with firsthand for years: slow, manual, error-prone processes for turning raw transaction data into something you can trust and report on.

What does your day-to-day look like at Kani?

Day-to-day, my focus is keeping us pointed in the right direction across product, strategy and partnerships. I spend time with our engineers and product teams to make sure what we’re building solves real problems. That means staying close to clients, auditors, regulators and scheme partners so we’re not just ticking boxes but actually making life easier for the people doing the work.

Outside of product, I’m involved in commercial strategy, international expansion and the bigger-picture decisions that shape where Kani goes next. Some days I’m deep in a client deployment; others I’m talking to a bank about integration, demoing our platform or feeding into an industry consultation. In payments data, the devil’s in the detail—so I like to stay close to the ground.

What does Kani do?

Kani is a SaaS reconciliation platform built by people who’ve lived the data pain of payments. Our goal is simple: take the mess out of reconciliation and reporting, and give teams better control over their financial data.

We help companies automate the matching, checking and reporting of payment flows across processors, banks, card schemes and internal systems. The outcome: smoother audits, simpler regulatory filings and less month-end stress.

Our platform covers three core areas:

• Automated reconciliation software — automate the matching of complex flows across processors, schemes and banks; centralise inputs; surface exceptions; accelerate close; improve data lineage.
• Transaction reporting — generate, validate and schedule regulatory and scheme outputs, including our award-winning Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC reporting module, with consistent templates and audit-ready evidence.
• Payments data analytics — real-time insight on volumes, fees, chargebacks, fraud indicators and operational KPIs to support operational resilience and capacity planning.

What sets us apart is the experience behind the product. Our team comes from all corners of card payments. We’ve been the ones manually stitching files together at month-end. That’s why we build tools that actually work in practice.

Today we’re working with global clients across the fintech ecosystem, helping them scale operations, stay compliant and get ahead of complexity.

How is Kani funded?

We’re privately funded. In early 2024, we raised a multi-million-pound Series A led by Maven Capital Partners, alongside support from NPIF II and the Maven VCTs. FT Partners acted as our exclusive financial advisor.

That investment is fuelling our next phase: expanding internationally, growing the team and doubling down on platform development to meet rising demand from regulated fintechs.

What’s the origin story at Kani?

Kani started as a problem I couldn’t ignore. In ops and compliance, I was manually wrangling processor data, submitting reports and firefighting errors caused by bad file formats or missing data. There had to be a better way—so we built one.

The idea was simple: take the pain out of payments reporting for the people doing the work. That meant automation, transparency and structure—especially as regulation and volumes only move one way (up).

We chose Newcastle as our HQ on purpose. The city has incredible tech talent, three universities on the doorstep and a growing fintech ecosystem that’s getting the recognition it deserves. We’re proud to be part of that.

Who are your target customers? What’s your revenue model?

Our customers are fintechs, issuers, processors, acquirers and BIN sponsors—anyone dealing with high-volume, high-stakes payments data.

Clients like Paysafe, Swiipr, Pluxee, Cardaq and TransactPay use Kani to reconcile billions in transactions and streamline reporting. We also have a referral relationship with Mastercard, who recognise the value of what we do and help introduce us to banks and fintechs worldwide.

We operate on a SaaS subscription model. Pricing scales with data volume and features, but our value proposition is the same: save time, reduce risk and give teams clarity over their data with payment reconciliation software, transaction reporting and payments data analytics that are audit-ready.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I’d fix the back-end mess. Fintech has made huge strides in UX and front-end innovation, but behind the scenes it’s still chaotic. Data is fragmented, terminology is inconsistent, and the same field can mean ten different things depending on the processor.

That’s the hidden tax on innovation. Every launch, audit and compliance check gets harder because the foundations are shaky. Stronger standards and more accountability around data quality would mean faster launches, cleaner reporting and fewer late nights in Excel.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Don’t assume your data is good enough—check it. And don’t wait for a regulator or auditor to tell you there’s a problem.

Poor data hygiene creates risk: reconciliation delays, reporting errors and safeguarding failures. Fixing that starts with visibility and accountability, often alongside specialist partners who know where to look. Practical next steps:

• Map every manual step in reconciliation and reporting.
• Measure the time spent on data prep vs exception resolution.
• Benchmark outputs against an audit-ready standard and daily reconciliation expectations.
• Prioritise projects that replace spreadsheets with automated reconciliation software and standardised transaction reporting.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

I’m a bit of a news junkie. For big-picture shifts and regulatory news, I go to the Financial Times, Reuters and Bloomberg. For fintech-specific coverage, I like Finextra and LinkedIn, especially for the conversations around product, compliance and ops.

I also read more niche titles like Banking Risk & Regulation, which go deeper on fraud oversight and back-office architecture. That’s where many of the real conversations start.

Who are 3 people from the FinTech sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

Three worth following: Marcel van Oost, the Fintech Finance team and Devie Mohan.

Marcel van Oost is one of the most consistent, well-informed voices in the industry, sharing insights and curating global fintech news.

Fintech Finance regularly produce high-quality content—interviews, trend analysis and event coverage—and remain a strong media presence.

Devie Mohan, co-founder of Burnmark, provides sharp analysis of financial innovation, regulation and the role of technology.

What FinTech services or apps do you personally use?

We’ve been using Airwallex at Kani, and it’s been spot on—reducing the hassle of managing global payments, which is exactly what you want when you’re growing quickly.

I’m impressed with what Zero is doing on carbon impact—helping businesses understand their environmental footprint, not just their finances.

And Monzo deserves a nod. From the early days they’ve kept things simple while pushing the boundaries of what a bank can be in 2025.

What’s the best new FinTech product or service you’ve seen recently?

As above, Zero’s Green Score stands out. It’s aimed at small businesses and translates financial data into a clearer picture of carbon footprint—spend on travel, energy, suppliers and so on. What’s clever is it doesn’t expect you to be a sustainability expert; it gives a simple score and practical suggestions to improve over time.

That kind of tool is a great example of fintech moving beyond money management into helping businesses make better decisions overall.

What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

One big trend is the end of manual reconciliation—and it can’t come soon enough. With transaction volumes rising and regulation tightening, no one has the time or appetite for spreadsheets and manual checks. Compliance reporting, safeguarding and fraud detection all depend on solid, traceable data.

As AI and automation integrate into more processes, tolerance for messy or unreliable inputs disappears. You can’t automate chaos. The winners will be those who take data seriously from the start and invest in getting it right—because everything else hangs off the back of that. Expect daily reconciliations, stronger data lineage, fewer exception backlogs and outputs that are audit-ready by design.

PaymentsJournal recently invited Roger Binks, Chief Commercial Officer at Kani, to join James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, for a discussion on why reconciliation and reporting are moving from “back office” to business-critical.

Originally featured in PaymentsJournal, this adapted article distils practical takeaways for compliance and operations leaders to modernise reconciliation and reporting as regulatory scrutiny intensifies. The discussion covers the state of the back office, the pitfalls of manual workarounds and concrete steps to make reconciliation and reporting automated, traceable and audit-ready.

A traceable and consistent baseline

Research from Kani found notable trends among payment leaders: just over a quarter of respondents said their firms were using fully automated reconciliation tools, while many still relied on spreadsheet-based solutions for this complex process.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents also reported frequent data errors during reconciliation—errors that are expected to become more expensive and time-consuming as regulators continue to raise the bar for compliance in the payments industry.

“The regulatory environment is becoming way more prescriptive than it ever has been,” Binks said. “Reconciliation and reporting outputs not only have to be consistent, but they have to be traceable. If you’re having a manual process in there, the workarounds that you have to put in place to make that traceability consistent is really tough.”

“In the UK, the FCA is extending operational resilience requirements into payments,” he said. “What this means is daily reconciliations, real-time controls and clearly documented processes are going to be mandatory. They’re going to be the sort of baseline of everyone’s business.”

As compliance tasks continue to grow, they add pressure to already strained operations. The report found that roughly 80% of respondents often miss reporting deadlines.

These difficulties will mount for organisations that don’t take steps to modernise.

“Things like reconciliation, reporting and compliance are things that we all talk about and we have for a long time,” Wester said. “We have talked about workarounds and band-aids and fixes and manual processes that are employed, while we also know that regulatory compliance and all of the things that that entails, it’s only getting more complex.”

“It’s a known issue, we all talk about it, and yet it continues to be something in 2025 that we are still talking about,” he said. “I’m almost sad about it. It’s almost like, ‘When do we start fixing some of this stuff, especially when we know that regulation and compliance are not going to get any less complex in the future?’”

Saving 700 hours

One reason manual processes and reporting issues have lingered is that they haven’t been the priority they should have.

“Whenever you see regulation or some type of mandate for the way a report must be submitted—or anything like that—a financial institution, a bank, or a business, they often look at what they must do and they work back from there,” Wester said. “It’s almost as though they try to find the least efficient way to do it. To me, I think we look at it the wrong way.”

Instead of viewing compliance as a chore, organisations should recognise that the reporting process produces a critical output: data. Through this lens, reconciliation and reporting become valuable assets—ones that can deliver dividends by offering deep insights into operations.

Beyond increased visibility, a modernised reporting process also offers tangible efficiency gains.

“We asked some questions around how long it took for people to prepare data—just getting it ready for the reconciliation process,” Binks said. “We found that the average UK payments business spends about three hours preparing data before reconciliations can even happen. With that mandatory daily reconciliation process being a requirement—if you work that out—it’s about 700 hours every year spent just preparing data.”

“Think of what you could do with 700 hours a year in terms of other work,” he said. “There’s some stark numbers in there which we can’t ignore.”

Everything is a dev ticket

As organisations begin updating their back-office processes, many will face the age-old buy-or-build dilemma. However, with the compliance bar rising rapidly and shifting daily, companies that choose to build solutions face significant challenges.

One of the main hurdles to in-housing is ensuring the organisation has the right resources in place—starting with personnel. But maintaining a dedicated compliance team presents its own set of issues.

“It depends upon the way the internal organisation is structured, which is oftentimes around a particular group or a particular person or a particular unit that’s built a certain way,” Wester said. “Just training is usually very inefficient. If that person ends up leaving—if the person in accounting retires and they were the one that knew how everything was put together—then it becomes a process of unpacking what they did to make that process work.”

Beyond assembling the right team, organisations must also possess the technical expertise and engineering capacity to develop an in-house solution. This is often a struggle: 60% of surveyed firms with internal solutions reported that resource constraints directly impacted their business growth and agility.

Many of these firms also noted that generating reports was too time-consuming, and that operating systems across multiple payments channels remained a challenge. Additionally, maintaining an in-house solution is a continuous process, one that many simply aren’t equipped to take on.

As a result of these challenges, few businesses are pursuing the in-house route. In Kani’s survey, less than 10% of respondents said their firm had built its own system.

“If you’ve in-housed it, all of those different changes—even if they’re internal requests—everything becomes a dev ticket,” Binks said. “Everything becomes an item on a list that someone’s got to deal with. If that’s not your main business, suddenly you’re in the business of building and running a reconciliation team, and that’s not really your core.”

The back-office holy grail

Despite challenges with in-house processes, many organisations continue to lean on them—often because they’re unaware of better alternatives.

“I think that’s one of the problems for people who are in compliance or operations—they don’t know what they don’t know sometimes in terms of what is available,” Wester said. “But also I think that sometimes operations and compliance people are not good advocates for their own needs. Sometimes they’re not tied to revenue, so building a business case for something like a solution in the back office can be a little bit difficult.”

Organisations that begin exploring potential solutions can uncover powerful benefits. Platforms such as Kani manage every aspect of the compliance process, including end-to-end automated reconciliation, submission-ready reports and iron-clad audit trails.

Another advantage of partnering with a provider is gaining access to the collective knowledge and experience across their entire portfolio. This enables them to stay current with regulatory changes and make proactive improvements to the platform.

“It’s about operational agility,” Binks said. “This isn’t about just speed, it’s about control, traceability and repeatability in a process that you can trust. If you can get that, then you’re in a good place, but it’s a challenge.”

“I would think about getting off Excel and manual systems,” he said. “It’s time to bite the bullet. People just need to work out when, and accept the fact that it’s coming at some point. The back-office efficiency Holy Grail is there—you don’t have to go and build it yourself.”