Author: Gayathri

The Financial Close Management (FCM) market entered 2025 with a decisive shift: enterprises are moving away from periodic, calendar-bound close cycles toward continuous, AI-driven, and controls-embedded accounting. Automation is now foundational rather than aspirational, and the newest SPARK Matrix™: Financial Close Management, Q4 2025, reflects this transformation clearly. Vendors differentiated themselves not by who could automate a checklist, but by who could deliver real-time anomaly detection, predictive intelligence, enterprise-grade reconciliation engines, and workflow orchestration deep enough to support autonomous accounting models. Amid this evolution, the year-on-year comparison between 2024 and 2025 reveals meaningful shifts in leadership positions, capability maturity, and…

Treasury has quietly transformed itself from an operational cost center into a strategic intelligence hub. In the past year, the Enterprise Treasury & Risk Management (ETRM) market has undergone one of the fastest evolutions seen in the SPARK Matrix™ landscape. Cloud-native platforms, GenAI-driven forecasting, real-time risk analytics, and hyper-connected API ecosystems have redefined competitive advantage. The 2025 SPARK Matrix™ for ETRM captures this shift precisely, highlighting not just who leads but why certain platforms rose, fell, or exited entirely. According to Hetansh Shah, Analyst at QKS Group, “Enterprise Treasury and Risk Management (ETRM) solutions are critical financial tools that empower…

Introduction Retail loan origination has entered a decisive new phase. QKS Group defines Retail Loan Origination Systems (RLOS) as end-to-end digital platforms designed to automate and manage the origination lifecycle of retail credit products, including personal loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages, education loans, and Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) offerings. RLOS platforms enable banks and financial institutions to digitize customer onboarding, perform real-time credit checks, configure loan products, apply risk rules, generate documentation, and execute approvals all through a seamless, customer-centric interface. These systems integrate with core banking, credit bureaus, identity verification tools, and payment gateways to ensure speed, compliance, and accuracy.…

Generative AI is no longer a lab experiment in financial services; it’s quietly running in customer service, software delivery, risk functions, and fraud teams. That shift blows up a lot of old assumptions in integrated risk management (IRM) and forces fintechs to treat GenAI governance as a first-class discipline, not an R&D side project. GenAI has arrived in financial services IRM Walk through any modern fintech stack and you’ll find GenAI everywhere; copilots embedded into CRM systems, “explain-this-alert” assistants in AML, code-generation tools wired into CI/CD, even internal chatbots used for policy and procedure queries. A growing body of surveys…

The new deal: JPMorgan starts charging for data For more than a decade, U.S. open banking ran on an odd subsidy: banks carried the cost and risk, while data aggregators and fintech apps captured most of the value. Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, Akoya, and others plugged into thousands of institutions, normalised the data, and resold connectivity to budgeting apps, robo-advisers, neobanks, and lenders, usually without paying the originating banks a cent for access. That equilibrium has just cracked. JPMorgan Chase has now reached agreements with several major aggregators that will see fintech firms pay the bank for access to customer account…

What Is KYC in Digital Banking Today? Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process banks use to verify a customer’s identity, understand their risk profile, and comply with anti–money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) rules. In a branch-first world, that meant paper forms, photocopied IDs, and many face-to-face judgment calls. In digital banking, the entire KYC process has shifted to mobile and web. Customers expect to open an account, upload documents, and pass identity checks from their phones in minutes, not days. KYC is no longer a back-office control; it’s a visible part of the onboarding journey that customers…

The New Collateral: Turning ESG Data into Financial Leverage In the evolving landscape of sustainable banking, 2026 marks a radical shift. The conversation has moved beyond green bonds and sustainability-linked loans, toward a future where ESG data itself becomes collateral. For decades, collateral meant tangible assets: property, inventory, or equipment. But as climate risk becomes synonymous with financial risk, banks are exploring how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics can directly influence lending terms, credit exposure, and asset valuation. The result? A new era of climate-linked finance, where your sustainability performance could quite literally back your loan. Why ESG-Linked Collateral…

Legacy, rules-based monitoring is like using a rear-view mirror to drive a Formula 1 car. Financial crime moves in milliseconds; most controls still react in days. AI-powered transaction monitoring gives fintechs real-time visibility into risk, without grinding customer experience to a halt or endlessly adding headcount. What Is AI-Powered Transaction Monitoring in Fintech? Transaction monitoring is the backbone of fraud and anti–money laundering (AML) controls. It tracks customer activity across payments, transfers, and accounts to spot suspicious behavior that might indicate fraud, money laundering, or sanctions breaches. Traditionally, this monitoring has been rules-based: flag everything over a fixed amount, block…

Why “Trust” Has Become the Weakest Link in Financial Security For decades, banks and financial institutions relied on the idea that once you were inside the system, you were safe. But in today’s digital-first, API-driven ecosystem, where a transaction crosses cloud services, open-banking APIs, and third-party vendors in milliseconds, trust is not protection. The financial sector’s evolving threat landscape demands a shift from “trust but verify” to “never trust, always verify.” This is the essence of Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), a model that treats every device, identity, and transaction as potentially compromised until proven otherwise. What began as a cybersecurity…

The New Reality of Platform Banking Picture this: a regional bank that once prided itself on agility and innovation now finds itself squeezed between mega-platforms with deeper pockets and stronger compliance capabilities. In just a few years, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has gone from a fragmented field of fintech hopefuls to a market defined by scale, regulation, and survival. What began as a movement to “open up” banking has now become a race to consolidate it. The question dominating boardrooms in 2025 isn’t whether BaaS will endure; it’s who will endure within BaaS. What Exactly Is BaaS Consolidation? At its core, Banking-as-a-Service…