Advanced automation

Kani Payments, established in 2018 in Newcastle, UK, developed an automated reconciliation and reporting platform. Designed to reduce complexities, the platform is used by traditional and challenger banks, electronic money issuers, fintechs and payment gateways, processors, and gift card providers, the company stated. Aaron Holmes, CEO and founder of Kani Payments, noted that a year after launching, the company was named Europe's Leading Financial Services or Payments Start-up by the Emerging Payments Association. Also in 2019, Alina Ciocan, Kani's head of finance and reconciliation, was named one of the most influential women in payments, he added.

Additional accolades for Kani include acceptance into Tech Nation's Fintech 3.0 growth program for the best and brightest UK fintechs, as well as a second place listing in Business Cloud's Fintech 50 rankings for 2021, which lists the year's top 50 UK companies creating original technology for banking, finance and payments. "We've been fortunate all the way, from our investors to engineers who followed us from other businesses," Holmes said. "Kani has a brilliant team with a team-first mentality and we built what we once wished had existed: a platform that can match faster payment records, manage reconciliation and regulator reporting, and build custom reports on demand."

Advanced automation

Holmes went on to say that Kani's platform has reconciled more than €5 billion in processed payments volume while helping payment providers and fintechs organize data across multiple processor, card scheme and issuing relationships. It can be challenging to turn disparate data sources in varying formats and raw files into actionable reporting, he stated, adding that global privacy laws can also slow the process, and manual reports can take weeks to complete.

Kani, a processor-agnostic company, can quickly ingest data from multiple processors, banks and BIN sponsors, significantly speeding reporting and account onboarding, and the platform expeditiously imports and reconciles raw data files in different formats to create understandable reports, Holmes stated."We do the heavy lifting so businesses can spend more time focusing on building good fintech products," Holmes said. "Businesses don't have to spend valuable time and resources trying to work out discrepancies in data flows. In many cases, Kani's reporting and reconciliation platform can complete large-scale reconciliations in just a few minutes."

Actionable intelligence

Holmes further noted that Kani provides expanded overviews of data that enable companies to benchmark performance with actionable business insights. Payment companies, for example, can view transactions approvals, declines and cardholder spending across locations and merchant categories, he stated. And clients can access data through Kani's easy-to-use dashboard, which helps them visualize transaction heat maps and other parameters, he added."If there's a data discrepancy, normally a company's finance operations team have to investigate why the numbers don't add up," Holmes said. "It becomes even more complicated when businesses have to interpret data from multiple processing platforms."

The sheer volume and complexity of data makes it difficult for companies to get the insights they need, and Kani works with multiple processors to validate data flows and quickly identify and resolve data discrepancies, Holmes noted. The platform can outpace manual systems and get to the heart of reconciliation queries, capturing revenue that might have otherwise been lost if left unreconciled, which helps clients get maximum value from their data, he added.

Global reseller opportunities

Kani employs 26 full-time specialists and plans to hire more staff as it continues its geographic expansion. Holmes mentioned that Kani, which provides white-label services, works with resellers and channel partners worldwide and has signed partnership agreements with large organizations in North America.

"The more data you have, the better decisions you can make," Holmes said. "Data-agnostic and platform-agnostic reconciliation and reporting tools can transform a business's operating capacity and ensure it's ready to grow and take advantage of new opportunities. When you have that amount of data, the possibilities are endless."

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