Kani Alternative: Evaluating Safeguarding Platforms as You Scale

The evaluation trigger

Kani Payments is positioned around payments and e-money data reconciliation and safeguarding reporting, and it is well understood in that segment. Firms open an alternative evaluation for reasons that are usually about trajectory rather than dissatisfaction.

The most common is regulatory breadth. A firm that started as a single-licence EMI acquires a second permission, expands into an EU corridor under PSD2, or adds an investment or custody arm subject to CASS 6 and CASS 7. At that point the question becomes whether safeguarding, CASS, and any other regime run on one engine or three.

The second is the evidential standard introduced by PS25/12 and the annual safeguarding audit, where firms are being asked to demonstrate the integrity of the historic record rather than to produce a current report of it.

The third is the analyst cost behind exception handling as transaction volumes grow.

What to test

Break investigation depth. Supply a month of real, unresolved breaks and measure how many are closed by the platform itself with correct, legible reasoning, rather than how many are matched automatically in the first pass.

Evidence integrity. Choose a historic date, request the complete control cycle, and ask how the firm would demonstrate to an auditor that the record has not been amended since it was created.

Regime coverage on one engine. Ask whether a second regulatory regime is an overlay on the same reconciliation runs or a separate product with separate data. The difference determines whether your firm ends up reconciling its reconciliations.

Source onboarding. Hand over a real counterparty file the platform has not seen and time the route to a working reconciliation.

Independent verification. Ask whether an auditor can verify a completed run without a login to your environment.

Where Safeheld is differentiated

One engine, multiple regimes. Safeguarding under PS25/12 and CASS 15, client money and custody under CASS 7 and CASS 6, EMR 2011, PSD2, and MiCA are regulatory overlays applied to the same reconciliation runs. A firm adding a permission adds an overlay, not a platform.

Autonomous investigation with memory. The engine investigates each residual break itself, retains what it learns about each counterparty's settlement behaviour, and applies that understanding to future breaks. Confidence gating routes only genuinely ambiguous items to a named reviewer.

Sealed, independently verifiable runs. Each reconciliation is committed as a SHA-256 Merkle root at execution, so an auditor or regulator can verify the integrity of a historic run without access to the firm's tenant.

Generated regulatory artefacts. Monthly FCA safeguarding returns, resolution packs, board reporting, and audit evidence sets all derive from the same sealed runs that produce daily operational positions, so every artefact is traceable to a fixed record.

What changes as a payments firm scales

At low volume, safeguarding is a reconciliation problem. At scale it becomes a population problem. Relevant funds sit with acquirers, schemes, agents, distributors, and correspondents, each with its own reporting cadence, and the control is only as good as its coverage of that population.

The second thing that changes is corridor complexity. Cross-border flow introduces settlement lag, correspondent intermediation, and multi-currency positions, all of which create timing differences that look identical to shortfalls until someone proves otherwise.

The third is regulatory surface. A second permission, an EU entity, or a custody arm each adds timing rules, thresholds, and reporting artefacts. Running those on separate systems produces separate versions of the safeguarding position, and reconciling the reconciliations becomes its own control weakness.

A platform chosen at low volume should be tested against the firm's three-year shape, not its current one.

Running a safe transition

Connect sources first and reconcile in parallel with the incumbent for a full reporting cycle, recording the daily comparison rather than summarising it afterwards. That record is what the audit committee needs to evidence equivalence.

Expect the parallel period to surface variances the existing process was absorbing. That is the value of the exercise, and it is better discovered under parallel running than during a safeguarding audit.

Where source data is retrievable, seal historic runs for a back period so the verifiable evidence trail does not begin on the cutover date.

Frequently asked questions

Can one platform cover safeguarding and CASS together?

It should. Safeheld treats each regime as an overlay on shared reconciliation runs, so a firm adding a permission adds regime-specific timing rules, thresholds, and reporting artefacts rather than a second system with a second version of the data.

What does independent verification of a reconciliation mean?

That a third party holding a sealed run can confirm its integrity without logging into the firm's environment. The run's hash is committed at execution, so any subsequent alteration to the record is detectable by anyone checking it.

Should a growing EMI choose a platform for its current volume or its future shape?

Its future shape. Coverage of the full relevant funds population, cross-border corridor handling, and multi-regime support are the constraints that bite as a firm scales, and each is expensive to retrofit.