Author: Gayathri

Real-time payments have moved from novelty to necessity. But behind the clean “instant payment successful” screen is a messy infrastructure challenge that banks, fintechs, and regulators are all scrambling to solve at once. The real-time moment: why infrastructure suddenly matters For decades, payments moved at the speed of the banking day: batch files, end-of-day settlements, cut-off times, and “T+1” that nobody seriously questioned. That world is disappearing fast. Real-time payment schemes such as India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, the U.S. FedNow and RTP networks, and the U.K.’s Faster Payments have pushed expectations toward “instant by default” across P2P, bill pay, merchant…

The Digital Risk Protection (DRP) landscape has matured sharply between 2024 and 2025, driven by buyers demanding unified external-risk visibility, faster takedowns, and deeper automation. The 2025 SPARK Matrix shows a market shifting decisively toward purpose-built DRP platforms rather than repackaged modules. The report also calls out a major structural shift: the vendors capable of continuously mapping external assets, correlating multi-surface signals, and executing rapid, in-house takedowns are the ones pulling ahead. At the same time, several long-standing players remain static, and a handful disappear altogether, illustrating how competitive and unforgiving this market has become. According to Sahil Dhamgaye, Analyst…

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.…

What is the SPARK Matrix™ The SPARK Matrix™, developed by QKS Group, is a proprietary competitive intelligence and benchmarking framework that evaluates technology vendors across two core dimensions: Technology Excellence and Customer Impact. It provides a data-driven, visual representation of how vendors perform against defined market standards, enabling enterprises to assess supplier capabilities, strategic direction, and operational maturity in a single analytical view. In the context of Retail Core Banking Systems, the SPARK Matrix™ evaluates vendors on their ability to deliver scalable, cloud-native, real-time, secure, and regulation-ready core platforms that support deposits, lending, payments, customer lifecycle, and digital ecosystem integration.…

The commercial lending technology landscape has shifted dramatically between 2024 and 2025. What was once a modest evolution is now a full-scale transformation, driven by the urgent demand for automation, real-time credit intelligence, and embedded finance capabilities. The 2025 SPARK Matrix™ continues to highlight these tectonic changes, reflecting how banks and non-bank lenders are re-evaluating their architecture to stay competitive. In comparing the 2024 and 2025 vendor sets, not only do we see clear winners and losers, but also a wave of fresh players, some surprising departures, and a reordering of priorities. Below, we break down who’s rising, who’s holding…

Vendor Risk Management (VRM) has quietly shifted from a compliance necessity to a core pillar of enterprise resilience. The 2025 SPARK Matrix™ highlights how global enterprises are reshaping their VRM programs, not through more questionnaires, but through AI-led automation, intelligence-driven assessments, and deeper integration into broader GRC and resilience programs. The year also marks a clear transition: more outsourcing, more fourth-party exposure, and more pressure on risk teams to operate at speed and scale. As a result, movement between the 2024 and 2025 quadrants becomes a strategic signal of which vendors are driving real innovation, and which are relying on…

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…