Osper is a UK fintech scale-up that was established in 2013 as a prepaid card offering and mobile app aimed at helping children learn about financial management.
Since then, Osper has developed its technology stack to help serve other companies in the fintech ecosystem. Osper’s successful transition from start-up to scale up means it’s now handling significantly larger data inflows that create more challenges in data reporting and reconciliation.
Rapid business evolution demands better data handling
The journey from being a start-up to a full-scale fintech is thrilling – but one that’s also fraught with pitfalls if not navigated carefully. Scaling up involves several logistical and operational challenges that need to be overcome, with increased data reporting and reconciliation demands that can make the difference between success and failure.
Osper is a prime example of a company that has made this successful transition. Launched in 2013, it began its journey as a prepaid card platform designed to help children and young people learn about budgeting and financial management through an easy-to-use prepaid card and mobile app. Aside from helping make payments for things like gaming and shopping, Osper also enabled children to set their own spending categories and savings goals through its ap, empowering them with good financial habits.
In 2019, Osper re-focused its work on maximising the potential of Osper’s technology, including expansion into the B2B space. This strategy was successful, allowing Osper to open its technology stack to banks, fintech start-ups and others on a white label basis to launch their own unique products and services, without having to spend considerable time and resources building in-house tech stacks. The flexibility of Osper’s technology-as-a-service proposition allows its clients to continue using their own processors, acquirers or issuing partners or to simply use Osper’s .
But Osper’s transformation from prepaid platform into a full tech stack servicing other fintech companies means its data reporting and reconciliation needs have changed and grown significantly, extending beyond prepaid transaction data. The company is now handling vastly increased data volumes on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, from many more sources than before. It’s not just the sheer size of the data pipeline that’s increased – Osper is now dealing with more fragmented raw data sets and formats than previously. When working with several processors and providers, data sets become more complicated and spread out across different sources.
According to Ester Piubeni, Operations Director at Osper:
“Our growth means there is more work involved in data reporting and reconciliation. For example, the number of reports that we have to prepare for accountants and our issuing banks has grown. Of course, we get audited more often as well. But it’s not just about the reporting we have to provide to issuing banks. It is also extremely important that we have the abiity to generate meaningful insights into our customer base.
This is a common challenge for start-ups which make the transition into scale-up phase, as the number of reports needed for reconciliations, accounting, auditing, regulatory reports and business intelligence insights increases significantly.
“One of the big challenges is that a company like ours has several providers,” adds Ester. “There are lots of data sets spread across different platforms, which makes reconciliations much more complicated.”
From complexity comes opportunity
Osper’s need for enhanced data reporting and reconciliation capabilities led it to identify Kani as the ideal partner.
Kani’s mission is to help businesses make sense of the vast volumes of data they have to deal with, through its award-winning SaaS platform, which consumes raw data from any processor or issuer, standardises it and presents it in an easy-to-understand away.
Working with Kani Payments has enabled Osper to streamline and standardise the increasing array of data sets it’s now dealing with. Osper can now speed up reporting times, generate deeper levels of actionable business intelligence insights and launch services for its clients in vastly improved time-to-market.
“What we love about the Kani platform is its ability to pull in data from different sources and reconcile it in a few minutes, whereas before reconciliations would take several hours. The system we were using before required users to know SQL and coding to interpret the data. For someone like me, who only knows basic SQL, it means I needed IT engineers to merge different data sets to make it understandable. Now, we don’t have to bother the engineers because we can get the information ourselves,” Ester says.
“It’s so useful to have all of that data flowing into one central platform, where our team can access it easily. That’s one of the biggest benefits of the Kani platform. It presents all of this data in a way that everyone in the company can understand and can access those insights to launch services or get fresh marketing insights a lot quicker than they would have done previously.”
With the time saved through automating reporting and reconciliations, it means Osper can deploy team members to more projects, creating even more operational efficiencies and agility. And when data insights are standardised and presented through Kani’s easy-to-navigate dashboard, business intelligence becomes accessible to everyone in the organisation who needs it to build better products and services.
“It’s a fantastic tool to gain insights into what our customers are doing. We can see how account holders are using our cards for spending, which are the most popular merchant locations and so on. This gives us much-needed insight on cardholder behaviour, and lets us see what our customers want. That kind of information can create a massive difference in creating marketing partnerships and is essential in designing future campaigns.”
The success of Osper’s partnership with Kani has given it the springboard to scale globally. Osper is now embarking on the next phase of its expansion plans, thanks to the new capabilities created through Kani’s enhanced data reporting power. “We’re working with partners in the MENA region allowing us to service banks and brands in thouse countries. ,” Ester says.
Through the strength of partnerships like these, and in just under four years since its inception, Kani Payments has already reconciled well in excess of €10 billion in processed payments volume to-date, bringing intelligent automation, accuracy and compliance to payments reconciliation and reporting to fintechs, acquirers and financial institutions worldwide.