Financial IT caught up with Kani’s Chief Commercial Officer, Marc McCarthy whilst at industry event, Pay 360 last month
During the short interview, Marc talks about Kani’s reconciliation tool, the recent Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Dear CEO letter, critical scheme and regulatory reporting and how Kani are creating an industry-wide standard scorecard for payments data, starting with data-processors and how good the quality of their data is.
Video Transcript:
My name is Mark McCarthy and I’m the chief commercial officer of Kani.
Kani is a reconciliation and reporting platform based out of Newcastle in the NorthEast of the UK. We have international clients worldwide,
and we provide every part of the reconciliation process in the payments ecosystem.
So a lot of our customers use us for reporting purposes, their settlement reconciliations, both bank and their schemes – and we also do scheme reporting as well. So we help a lot of our clients with compliance and regulatory reports.
I would say the hottest topic this week is definitely the the CEO letter from the FCA that was published last week. We certainly see that the payments and FinTech markets are maturing, and as part of that maturilization they become more into the limelight.
Obviously, we’ve seen companies that have recently gone, had issues like Railsr for example, who basically had some degree of issues around their reconciliations and safeguarding, which is obviously what prompted the regulator to issue the letter in the first place.
So I think that’s the hottest topic. From my perspective, safeguarding is actually a relatively straightforward process, really, but it all depends on your data, and we all know that data is a new oil. But with so much data from so many different sources, I think there in lies the complexity for many organisations to really get a true handle on their reconciliations of their customer accounts and whether or not these are out of balance for safeguarding purposes.
So we are most definitely interested in showcasing our safeguarding capabilities but we’re also quite keen to stress that we can also help companies with their quarterly reports, whether it’s the QMR report for MasterCard or the GOC report for Visa, for example.
These are really laborious processes that would take a lot of time to do manually, all three of those.
So we really want to showcase how can really take the pain out of that and perform all of these reporting requirements within a short space of time. I think the challenge is coming back to data is data.
So we here at Kani are actually going to be creating a scorecard of the different processes and how good the quality of their data is. We definitely think it’s time that there’s more standardisation and that will seriously help a lot of payment firms actually perform their duties better.
I think the opportunity from an innovation standpoint is obviously to leverage. What we see coming through with a like ChatGPT for example, is a great example of a great product that can really help organisations.
So how can we leverage on that? We can leverage on that by using AI to really interpret the data that we receive.
That’s definitely on our road map. And we also want to use to assist us with identifying why things don’t reconcile and really be able to have the first level intelligent investigation through AI rather than through a human being.
The idea, really of Kani is that we become almost a black box to allow our users to really just have visibility of core issues rather than having people to go through a lot of data manually.
Interview with Financial IT
Financial IT Interview with Marc McCarthy, CCO of Kani Payments