Company: Kani Payments
CEO and Founder: Aaron Homles
Website: https://kanipayments.com/
About Kani Payments
Kani Payments was founded in 2018 by Aaron Holmes, previously Chief Operating Officer at Flex-e-Card and Chief Innovation Officer at Thredd. While preparing transaction reports at Flex-e-Card, Aaron spent hours reconciling fragmented data, resolving mismatches and chasing errors across systems. Convinced there had to be a better way, he built the platform he wished he had. From headquarters in Newcastle, Kani launched as a software platform purpose-built to simplify back-office operations for the payments and fintech sectors. That same year, the company was named the Leading Payments Start-up in Europe. Kani has navigated the challenges of scaling a specialist B2B SaaS business in a regulated industry while solving a problem most incumbents had accepted as unavoidable.
The first challenge was proving that manual, fragmented back-office work could be fully automated without compromising compliance. Payments data arrives in dozens of processor formats and feeds into regulatory reports with zero margin for error. Building a platform to ingest, normalise, reconcile and report this data, while keeping pace with evolving Mastercard and Visa requirements, demanded deep domain expertise and sustained engineering investment. The second was earning trust at scale. Payments and fintech businesses do not change their reconciliation infrastructure lightly. Kani answered this by working hand in hand with clients, shaping every feature around emerging reporting requirements, new processor formats and real user feedback. ISO 27001 certification further reinforced its security and compliance credentials.
The third challenge was growth. In the past 12 months, Kani has secured 10 new client wins, raised a multi-million Series A round led by Maven Capital Partners, and grown headcount by 25 percent to 30 full-time staff. Strategic partnerships with firms such as Pismo and participation in the FIS Fintech Accelerator programme have fuelled this expansion while keeping the product sharply focused.
Kani has changed what payments and fintech businesses expect from their back-office technology. By automating reconciliation, reporting and analytics, it compresses processes that once took entire teams days into minutes, freeing operators to focus on growth rather than manual data work. The QMR and GOC reporting tools illustrate the impact. Purpose-built for Mastercard and Visa requirements, they convert what was once a 150-hour annual process into a two-click submission, delivering 100 percent formatting compliance. This innovation earned Kani the Payments Compliance Technology of the Year award at the 2024 Payments Awards.
The platform now supports clients from innovative start-ups to global leaders, including Paysafe, Transact Payments, Cardaq and Pluxee. Across this customer base, Kani reduces operational costs, strengthens compliance and delivers the scalability modern payments businesses require as regulation intensifies. More broadly, Kani has shifted industry thinking. Where many finance platforms chase breadth, Kani has shown the power of depth and specialism, a platform built entirely around payments and fintech innovators, with no bloat and no generic workflows. It has raised the bar for back-office technology in the sector, making agility, compliance and scalability the new standard rather than the exception.
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