Kani Payments and New UK Fintech Zero Team Up to Tackle Climate Change

Kani Payments, the disruptive global data reconciliation and reporting platform, has today announced a partnership with Zero, a new UK climate-focused fintech. 

Kani Payments’ award-winning data reconciliation and reporting platform will enable Zero to streamline its reconciliation and reporting requirements and bolster operational efficiency from the outset, freeing up time and resource to deliver best-in-class customer service and support to its customers.

Based in Cardiff, Wales, Zero will be launching under e-Money regulations to provide a Mastercard debit card, personal account with zero fee and zero commission when spending abroad, and finance app with a focus on sustainability. Zero intends to apply for a full UK bank licence to enable the launch of a range of sustainable lending products in the future.

By analysing customers’ spending data to identify areas of their lifestyle contributing to climate change, the app will both educate customers around their consumption and environmental impacts, as well as offering them solutions to make reductions. Through personalised insights and actionable recommendations, Zero will empower individuals to reduce their carbon footprint and effortlessly contribute to climate and nature-positive solutions.

Kani’s partnership with Zero comes at a time when the effects of climate change are spurring consumers and businesses to take proactive steps to address it. According to Zero’s research, Gen Z consumers are far more likely to expect the brands and businesses they interact with to be climate-conscious, with 75% of UK people between the ages of 21 and 34 anxious about climate change. Zero’s research also found that of the 14 million 21-to-34 year-olds in the UK, 7 million indicate an appetite for Zero’s proposition. 

Aaron Holmes, Founder and CEO of Kani Payments, says: “The partnership between Kani Payments and Zero Fintech is a powerful one that will support Zero’s ambitious vision of helping its customers to make a meaningful and positive impact on climate change. Zero offers more than just a finance app; it provides a way to make personal finance a part of the solution to environmental issues.

“That’s why Kani Payments exists – our data reporting and reconciliation platform has been built by fintech experts and is designed to help disruptive fintechs like Zero to thrive and grow. We do the heavy lifting of making complex data simple and standardised, so that business can focus on giving their customers outstanding products and services.”

Richard Theo, CEO at Zero Fintech, comments: “Our vision is a world where money is a force for the good of the planet. Where money will never be used for anything that isn’t getting us to net zero as fast as possible.

“We’re aiming to fill a much-needed gap between best-in-class digital banking and effortless sustainability that simply isn’t currently available. With Kani’s help, we are building a finance product that can help us all to understand our individual environmental impacts and offer our customers easy ways to begin to reduce their impact.”

Zero became B Corp-certified in July 2024 and is set to launch to the public in January 2025. 

Kani Payments helps businesses across the payments and fintech industries to turbocharge essential reconciliation and reporting processes. Their SaaS platform rapidly ingests and standardises transaction data from diverse sources, reconciles large datasets in seconds, and delivers a range of pre-formatted or bespoke reports.

Kani has enjoyed stellar success since its inception in 2018, empowering clients with enhanced transaction reconciliation, regulatory and card scheme reporting, merchant settlement, customer fund safeguarding, and more. So far, it has reconciled more than €24 billion in processed payments volume for start-ups, scale-ups, and established players across the fintech spectrum, including Sodexo, Transact Payments, Osper, IDT, Moorwand and Paysafe.  

To date, Kani Payments’ notable achievements include: 

• Saving its clients $500,000 per year through automation of common reporting outputs and reconciliation​; 
• Accelerating Mastercard and Visa QMR/GOC reporting times (required to be submitted by all issuers of their cards) from three weeks to just three minutes – no other compliance reporting platform has this ability​; 
• Acceptance onto the highly sought-after Mastercard Start Path Global programme in 2022 (which has just a 2% acceptance rate) and the FIS Accelerator programme in 2023 as one of just 10 high-potential fintech companies. Only six UK companies (including Kani) have ever been selected for FIS’ programme in its eight years; 
• Securing key partnerships with some of the world’s most exciting fintech and payments players, including Brazilian issuer processing and core banking platform, Pismo, carbon intelligence platform Earthchain, issuer processor CLOWD9, and UK neobank Frost.