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.
