If you’re a payment company looking for a BI (business intelligence) solution to identify actionable trends in your customer/transaction data or enhance regulatory compliance processes, then you’re probably dealing with issues such as:
- You’re receiving large volumes of data from multiple sources and in different formats, making it difficult to compile and utilise data for reports and analysis.
- Most BI solutions are either too generic (i.e., they’re designed for general use, not specifically for the payment/banking sector), too complicated to set up and use or simply lack the functionality you need.
- Building your own in-house BI solution is a costly and a complex endeavour that requires dedicated resources as well as the right in-house expertise.
As a payment company, you need a BI solution to ingest large amounts of complex financial data, monitor transactions to detect fraud and generate reports specific to the payment industry (e.g., card scheme compliance reports, safeguarding reports, transaction monitoring, etc.).
It also needs to enhance your data analytics while having the flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and reporting requirements.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Three critical factors to look for in a BI solution
- How the Kani platform works as a BI solution for banking and payment companies
- Why you should use Kani for your business intelligence
- How Kani’s BI and reporting solution helped a payment company improve safeguarding compliance
Looking for a business intelligence solution specifically designed for banking and payments? Try a demo of Kani
Three critical factors to look for in a BI solution for banking and payments
Businesses in the payment and banking industry deal with unique challenges that most BI solutions aren’t designed to address. We’ll discuss three of those challenges in this section, as well as the critical capabilities your BI solution must have to address them.
1. Must be able to easily ingest and standardise large, complex data from multiple sources and in different formats
As a payment company, you’re probably dealing with three significant issues:
- You’re receiving high volumes of data. Combing through all of it to perform manual reconciliations or create transaction reports is a huge time drain and prone to costly errors.
- You’re getting data from a lot of different sources. Having disparate datasets in different locations makes it difficult to get a holistic view of your entire portfolio.
- Each data source provides data in different formats. This could mean different file formats (including XML, CSV and JSON) and/or data that’s presented differently (i.e., different columns, currencies, etc.). Either way, formatting differences create challenges around data consistency and accessibility.
Ultimately, you just want a solution that delivers the end-results — i.e., the reports and information you need to maintain compliance and grow your business — without having to worry about how the tool works and spending hours learning to use it.
2. Must handle requirements and reports specific to payment companies
You’ll need a BI solution to address specific challenges of the fintech industry, such as:
- Generating properly formatted regulatory reports, such as the FCA e-money report.
- Generating properly formatted compliance reports, such as card scheme compliance reports, safeguarding reports, etc.
- Performing reconciliations and transaction monitoring (as well as generate the corresponding reports) for your accounts.
Most generic BI solutions aren’t optimised for banking and payments. For example, they don’t include pre-built report templates for Mastercard QMR or Visa GOC reports.
While you can configure a generic solution to create card scheme reports, setting them up and training someone in-house to use them drains substantial time and involves a steep learning curve.
Additionally, you may not know what type of information to include in compliance reports and worry that errors might lead to fines.
In the long run, you’ll save significant resources and achieve a better outcome by finding a solution that’s tailored to the needs of the payment industry.
3. Must be customisable enough to tailor to your business needs
Beyond addressing the unique challenges of the payment industry, your BI solution should be customisable enough that you can adapt it to your organisation’s specific needs. For example, it should:
- Be able to present your data analysis as you want it (e.g., organised into the appropriate columns, add or eliminate fields, etc.).
- Allow you to build custom reports for the specific insights you need as a payment company (e.g. demographics of specific card users) to make informed decisions.
- Give you granular control over reconciliations and reports, such as creating specific reports for each of your clients.
Some companies choose to build their own BI solution in-house and tailor it to their requirements. But in our experience, companies this path doesn’t consider the amount of time, effort and expertise required to do so. Only after investing heavily in the project do they realise that they don’t have the resources and expertise to create a solution that adds real business value.
For example, you’ll need to build a tool that can be used by Subject Matter Experts who may not have the technical knowledge required to write queries against your database (e.g., declining rate of re-authorisations). So you’ll need a payments-savvy IT team to build features usable by payment experts.
Building a BI solution involves:
- Combining different generic BI software (such as Looker and Power BI) and configuring these solutions individually to your product, as well as combining them in one report. You might even consider investing in a payment reporting API.
- Spending a great deal of time optimising and automating data integration processes (i.e., getting from raw data to the end report).
- Coordinating across different teams in your organisation — such as card payment experts who understand the data, IT staff who write database queries and of course end users.
Many of our clients came to us because, after wasting significant time and resources on an in-house solution, they realised it wasn’t delivering what they needed. Ultimately, using a BI solution that’s tailored to the financial sector and regularly updated is more cost-effective and leads to a better outcome.
How the Kani platform works as a BI solution for payment companies
Frustrated with spending too much time and resources on manual reconciliations, our CEO Aaron Holmes set out to create a reconciliation and reporting solution that’s tailored to the needs of the payment industry.
He designed Kani to automate reconciliation and reporting to save time and produce more reliable results. Since 2018, Kani has reconciled billions of processed payment volumes for challenger banks, financial institutions, BIN sponsors, acquirers and more.
Here’s how Kani works:
1. Ingest and standardise your data
Kani ingests data from any source, consolidating it all into one place that gives you a holistic view of your entire portfolio.
Rather than setting up your own data collection pipelines (like most solutions require), our team creates your data ingestion pipelines for you. Kani supports all common file types (such as CSV, JSON, XLS, etc.) and ingests data from any source (such as processors, card transactions, internal
ledgers, banks or third parties) via SFTP file transfer.
Once we configure your pipelines, Kani automatically processes and standardises your data. It converts all of your data into the same file formats and adjusts the files based on your specifications — e.g., cleansing and trimming data. But Kani never alters the original files and always keeps copies for reference.
2. Automatically perform reconciliations and transaction monitoring
Once data is in our system, Kani automatically performs reconciliations and transaction monitoring.
During onboarding, we create a product configuration based on your product information (such as program managers, BIN ranges, processors, etc.) and needs.
This allows us to tailor how Kani handles reconciliations, transaction monitoring and report generation according to your specifications.
For example, if you want to create unique reconciliations for each customer, Kani uses the product configuration and raw data for each customer to generate reconciliations at the client or currency level.
Kani uses advanced transaction matching to perform reconciliations for massive datasets in under 30 seconds. Once you’ve reconciled the account, Kani automatically produces a reconciliation report for a senior staff member to complete via automated sign-off.
Kani gives you oversight of your accounts and helps to prevent fraud or money laundering with automated transaction monitoring. You can set triggers that alert you to suspicious transaction activity (such as large transactions, repeat transactions, an unusually high number of transactions, etc.) and flag suspicious accounts or transactions.
3. Configure reports and dashboard for compliance and BI
Kani is designed to adapt to the specific needs of your organisation — both in terms of how data is presented and how you create reports.
We can help you create your own custom dashboard for a holistic view of your accounts and reconciliations, so you get a high-level overview of your entire financial portfolio in one location.
Kani includes pre-built payment report templates to get you up and running quickly, such as Mastercard QMR reports, Visa GOC reports, safeguarding reports, transaction monitoring reports and e-money reports.
All our existing report templates are properly formatted according to compliance with regulatory standards. Because they’ve been tested by Kani’s clients, you can be sure that our pre-templated reports will be accepted by regulators and won’t require further formatting or customisation.
Once we ingest and model the data for our pre-built reports, you can use the modelled data and Kani’s report-builder feature to create your own custom reports. This saves you a lot of time, as you won’t have to model the data yourself.
Kani makes it easy to create reports to provide actionable customer insights into your financial services activity, allowing you to study customer spending and market trends, monitor KPIs, forecast customer behaviour, understand customer demographics and leverage data for business decision making.
Why use Kani for your Business Intelligence?
Unlike other banking business intelligence solutions, Kani is a reconciliation and reporting solution designed specifically for the payment industry. It contains other features that enable you to tailor the solution to your individual needs and easily obtain the reports and valuable insights you need.
Set up your BI tool quickly with our automatic data ingestion and standardisation
Kani enables you to get set up with a BI tool in days, rather than weeks or months. It integrates with 25+ processors and data sources (such as Mastercard, Visa, Thredd, Marqeta, etc.). And if you need data from a source that we don’t already integrate with (such as internal ledgers), we can help you set this up.
Our team will help you configure data pipelines and fix any issues that arise, so you don’t have to waste time trying to figure it out on your own. You can create email alerts that notify you when files haven’t arrived on time. For example, if you’re expecting six files by 1:00pm but you’ve only received four, Kani will alert you via email so you can catch the issue ahead of time and figure out what went wrong.
Once processed, Kani standardises your data for consistency via automation, making it easier to analyse and compare data between different products, customer segmentation, merchants and geographies. The system can:
- Convert all files to the same file format for consistency.
- Cleanse and trim the data according to your specifications.
- Segregate data (for example, if the date and time are presented together in one column, Kani can separate it into two columns).
- Consolidate data from multiple different files onto one file (for example, if you ingest four files and one of the files is missing a unique reference that’s required for record matching, Kani can locate it in the other files and combine the datasets).
- Make any other adjustments so your data is presented as you want it.
Use pre-built payment report templates to easily maintain compliance and avoid fines
Many companies must generate daily safeguarding reports to evidence the availability of appropriate funds in each of their client’s safeguarding accounts. This tedious process can consume lots of time for financial teams, and any mistakes can result in fines.
But Kani saves you time and enables easy compliance by providing properly formatted report templates for:
1. Card scheme compliance reports
Card scheme members can use Kani to automatically generate reports like the Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC. These reports deliver 100% compliance with card scheme formatting requirements and include all required information, such as the transaction volumes, number of open cards added to the program since the previous quarter, number of disputes, etc.
2. E-money reports
Kani includes a pre-built template for the FCA e-money report in compliance with the Payment Services Regulations (PSRs) of 2017.
3. Safeguarding reconciliation reports
Kani makes it easy to reconcile safeguarding accounts and create reports, so you can ensure that your safeguarded accounts always have the correct balance at any time (and backdate them).
4. Transaction monitoring reports
Kani monitors transactions on your accounts and generates comprehensive transaction monitoring reports. You can set triggers that alert you to certain types of transaction activity indicative of fraud or money laundering (such as large transactions, repeat transactions or an unusually high number of transactions), giving you oversight of your accounts to detect and prevent fraudulent activity.
5. Reconciliation reports
Kani performs advanced record matching for large datasets in under 30 seconds. If it detects a variance or a break, it sends alerts via email, so you don’t even need to open the platform unless investigation is required.High-quality, trustworthy data is essential for payment companies.
We’ve designed Kani to make it easier than ever to resolve discrepancies in your reconciliations.The automated Case Manager feature assigns investigative tasks to the most relevant person on your team. Any actions they or any user takes within the system are marked with a timestamp, meaning you can track investigations and modifications via notes and attachments.
Kani maintains a full audit trail of all of your reports and activity. In addition to marking any changes with timestamps, it also takes snapshots of your reports and reconciliations (at a frequency of your choosing). So if something goes wrong, you can easily figure out what happened and fix the issue.
When you’re ready to finalise your reconciliation reports, senior staff members can sign off on them with an automated signature. You’ll also be able to automatically send the reports to the appropriate parties (e.g., CEO, regulators, someone in another department, etc.) via email.
Create your own reports and generate new insights into your customers and transactions
The primary litmus test for a payments business intelligence solution is how much it helps you understand and use transaction data for strategic decision making. In addition to modelling your data according to your specifications, Kani provides a report-builder tool that enables you to create your own reports to leverage your data.
Kani’s report-builder gives you the flexibility to see the data you’d like without having to build a reporting tool yourself. You can create reports to:
- Understand customer spending, such as geographic reports that show you the locations where most transactions occur.
- Monitor real-time metrics, such as transaction volumes, transaction success and revenue.
- Use customer data forecasting to predict trends in market and customer behaviour.
How a payment company used Kani to include account identifiers and complete safeguarding reconciliations more accurately
One of our clients is a payment company with bases in Europe (EU issuing arm) and the UK (UK issuing arm). They must perform daily safeguarding reconciliations to ensure their client’s safeguarding accounts always have the appropriate funds (and, if not, transfer the necessary funds to those accounts) and generate safeguarding reports to remain compliant with EU and UK regulations.
Before switching to Kani, they were using a banking BI solution built-in house. The solution wasn’t delivering and maintenance was challenging given the lack of in-house expertise.
For example, incoming data from one of their processors lacked an account identifier for transactions. Without the account identifier, they had no way of knowing which account a transaction balance was referring to — which, needless to say, is essential for completing safeguarding reconciliations.
With Kani, they were able to pull the account identifier from each transaction with this processor and correctly attribute accounts to either the EU or UK.
Now, Kani’s reports display the balance attributed to each account, allowing them to better understand any issues with their safeguarding accounts, protect customer funds and maintain compliance with safeguarding regulations. Kani also takes the entire safeguarding process off their plate — it automatically ingests their data, generates reports and sends them to the appropriate parties.
The client also makes full use of the Kani platform.
They use it to:
- Consolidate data management processes
- Perform reconciliations
- Generate regulatory and compliance reports
- Generate bespoke reports specific to their business goals
- Monitor transactions to prevent fraudulent activity
Kani: A BI solution tailored for payment companies
For companies in payments, using a generic BI solution or building one in-house leads to a lot of time and energy that is better spent elsewhere. These business intelligence tools take too long to set up, may require in-house expertise to operate and often don’t allow you to generate the payment-specific reports that you need.
Kani is a business intelligence platform designed specifically for the payment industry. Kani takes care of all of the heavy lifting (integrating data sources, ingesting and standardising data), provides pre-built report templates specific to the payments industry (QMR, GOC, safeguarding, reconciliation, transaction monitoring, etc.) and enables you to create your own reports.
Want to see the platform live? Book a demo now.
