Originally featured in The Fintech Magazine, this exclusive article explores why many payments firms are struggling with outdated reconciliation systems—and what it takes to fix them.
The hidden cost of a frictionless front end
In the rush to deliver seamless customer experiences, too many payment providers are still papering over cracks in their back-end systems. Roger Binks, Chief Commercial Officer at Kani, shares why reconciliation and reporting are overdue for a rethink—and how firms can move from firefighting to future-ready.
As customers continue to enjoy ever-more frictionless payments, behind the scenes, reconciliation and reporting systems are buckling. There’s only so long you can paper over the cracks, says Kani
The rise of real-time payments, open banking initiatives, and embedded finance solutions has created new possibilities – but also surfaced dizzying new complications.
Fragmentation and technical debt
Financial institutions must now manage an increasingly diverse array of payment rails, regulatory and scheme reporting requirements, settlement timeframes, and reconciliation challenges. This fragmentation opens the door to data inconsistencies and errors, especially when businesses rely on outdated infrastructure with processes that lag behind business growth.
Misaligned systems happen for a number of reasons, including the challenges of managing unstructured data, dynamic regulatory changes, higher-than-planned transaction volumes, and the inherent headache of trying to persuade disparate systems to talk nicely with one another. Everyone wants to enthuse about front-end offerings, but data reconciliation is something of an elephant in the room, an issue which, if unaddressed, risks financial errors and regulatory non-compliance.
Failure to modernise systems and improve processes leads to missed opportunities and weakened competitive positioning, too. Because, as operations teams stay bogged down in daily reconciliation and error correction, strategic initiatives – such as product innovation and customer experience improvements – are often, inevitably, pushed aside.
In an industry where customer expectations are evolving rapidly, this technical debt becomes an increasingly expensive burden.
Manual processes still dominate—and it shows
“Processes are fragmented, reporting is reactive, and most businesses aren’t set up to scale if regulation intensifies,” says Roger Binks, Chief Commercial Officer at Kani, a UK-based leader in automated reconciliation and reporting. “Companies struggle with resource constraints, manual workarounds, and formatting inconsistencies by default, not exception”.
Indeed, dependence on manual, spreadsheet-based payments remains shockingly widespread, according to Kani’s Payments Reconciliation & Reporting Survey 2025. It found that spreadsheet-based processes were still a cornerstone for 56 per cent of the 250 UK payments businesses it surveyed, with a whopping 94 per cent of those struggling to meet reporting deadlines.
“Our survey found that 41 per cent of respondents still prefer using Excel. That’s a crazy number,” says Binks.
A shift in mentality is needed
Part of this is clearly down to mindset. The report found that undertaking ambitious new update plans is seen as risky, a concern echoed in a 2024 Financial Times study that reported the pervasive fear of ‘disrupting the status quo’ significantly hampers the scale and ambition of modernisation efforts.
“But that very disruption can create strategic advantages – exposing inefficiencies, revealing compliance gaps, and enabling the transparency needed for faster, smarter decisions,” says Binks. “It’s a shift from viewing reconciliation as a routine cost of doing business to recognising it as a source of insight and value.
“The biggest shift is mental, not technical,” says Binks. “Stop thinking of reporting and reconciliation as a chore. They’re strategic capabilities.”
Born in the trenches: Kani’s founding story
Kani’s story is emblematic of what that mindset can achieve. In the words of its founders, Kani was not dreamed up on a pitch deck, but born from the operational trenches.
The founding team cut their teeth working within payment firms that were scaling fast – gaining new users at the cost of clarity and control over transaction data. They witnessed first-hand what poor implementation can do, an experience that led Kani to create a purpose-built product for automating reconciliation, reporting, and compliance processes in the payments space.
In house tools vs. fit-for-purpose platforms
“One of the things I love about my job is helping customers fix the things that are really broken in their business,” says Binks. Many companies opt to construct their own solutions. Control, flexibility, customisation are all compelling advantages of this approach, but reality doesn’t always match expectations. Kani’s own findings support this, revealing that while 10 per cent of firms still rely on in-house tools, 71 per cent say reporting takes too long and 64 per cent suffer frequent data errors.
A further 41 per cent note that fixing those errors drains critical internal resources.
“In-house systems might offer control, but they require continuous development just to keep up with scheme and regulatory changes,” says Binks. “Firms need to be honest with themselves. Are they trying to build a payment reporting tool or trying to run a business? Because, if it’s the former, they’ll need a dedicated roadmap, team, and support model to match.”
Composable banking and the partner-led model
For teams who want control of their tech stack, without the burden of maintenance, new models are emerging. A 2024 Gartner report champions the pursuit of ‘composable banking’ as a critical capability for financial institutions, claiming that those that adopt a modular, API-driven approach to critical functions like payment operations can respond to change 40 per cent faster than those with monolithic systems.
Industry appetite is growing for this partner-led strategy, with a recent EY study finding that 55 per cent of banks expect partnerships to play a ‘very important’ role in 2025, which is up from 32 per cent in 2023. By leveraging the benefits of systems such as those offered by Kani in a partner-based model, banking providers are able to draw on the strengths of a specialised, focussed team, without having to dedicate their own personnel to achieving these goals.
Why automation is a strategic advantage
Kani’s customers are able to mix-and-match required functions as their current needs dictate. And, by giving finance and operations teams real-time visibility into flows, fees, and scheme performance, a black-box mystery can become a valuable source of insight, which can also accelerate financial close and reporting cycles, delivering more timely and reliable data.
Moreover, automation frees finance teams from repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value work like financial analysis and strategic planning. With consistent, real-time financial data, CFOs and finance leaders can produce insights that guide corporate strategy, investment decisions, and risk management.
At its core, Kani’s mission is to give companies greater operational flexibility – a growing advantage in what the Alliance for Innovative Regulation calls the era of tech-driven financial regulation.
Flexible and future-ready
In today’s environment, new rules can emerge and take effect with little warning, demanding constant adaptability rather than reactive compliance. That requires reconciliation and reporting systems designed for change, with configurable fields, flexible logic, and real-time validation. When clients face new reporting or regulatory requirements, they don’t need to rely on their dev teams to make updates.
Instead, Kani’s platform allows compliance changes to be configured directly, keeping processes fast, flexible, and future-ready. As financial services evolve, payment operations are becoming both a challenge and a strategic opportunity. Forward-thinking institutions now see reporting and reconciliation not as back-office tasks, but as competitive advantages.
By standardising data and automating processes, they’re better equipped to navigate rising regulatory demands and shifting customer expectations.
In time, this approach will separate leaders from laggards–making back-end systems as seamless and agile as the payment experiences they power.
