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About Us

About KNI

New Ventures Specialists

  • A multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual team of over 200 professionals across four continents
  • Our new ventures teams combine the best of both: financial services domain experts and entrepreneurs with deep startup and fintech experience
  • Our global footprint enables 24 /7 delivery to bring new ventures to market much faster than our clients could working alone
  • Founded in 2005 by financial services, software executives & startup specialists
80 +
Clients
8
Years in Business
25
Markets
Our Mission

Develop, Launch and Scale new ventures

In-depth US, UK and global, domain expertise  across the credit, payments and fintech sectors

Successful track record delivering new ventures for large multi-nationals, to mid-sized banks / issuers and fintech’s / alternative lenders across 30 markets around the globe, including 21 European markets

Deep experience in new ventures, coupled with our global footprint translates to fintech-like speed for our financial services clients

Consumer & Business Credit
Retail & Business Banking
Payments
Fintech
Global resources, aligned for local execution, with a 24x7 delivery model

We are principally known for helping clients do three things...

DEVELOP

Whether you have an existing portfolio of venture ideas or you need help identifying them, our years of experience in conducting Innovation Sweeps and Ideate Programs, coupled with our Innovation Management System helps systematically create a robust pipeline.  We log every assumption or risk that is identified along the way, then rigorously address each of them by designing and running key experiments.  All of this dramatically improves the probability we will help you identify and build truly investable ventures.

  • Systematic Innovation
  • Rigorous Business Model Design & Market Sizing
  • Data-driven Business Validation

LAUNCH

Our teams build out the infrastructure needed to prepare for controlled launches.  This includes the systems, data integration, processes, technology and people required to run the new venture.  We then sort out the targeting, promotion, pricing, risk management and people plans to form the detailed roadmap required to execute a successful launch.  We drive the buzz-building continuously – before, during and after the launch. 

  • Infrastructure Build Out
  • Go to Market Roadmap
  • Promotion and Buzz Building

SCALE

We then work hard to help you get more.  More customers, more market share, more thought-leadership, more differentiation, more movement and we further accelerate the buzz building.  Using growth hacking techniques learned from the world’s leading high-growth startups we set about growing the business within it’s pilot market and then systematically identifying incremental markets for the business or product.

  • Growth Hacking for Rapid In-Market Growth
  • Value Chain Assessment & New Market Value Plays
  • Raising Capital

Our global resource footprint enables 24/7 delivery for rapid formulation of new product or business ventures to help our clients gain access to new markets or simply drive new revenues in an existing business line

Our people and their skillsets

How we make all this happen:

We create a new venture build plan and assign a senior Venture Builder to lead it

  • Our full new venture plans are the product of years of experience in launching startups – where we’ve learned all the details and the sequence of every step in a venture buildout
  • Our plans include the most granular details across all the areas needed to build a business – from legal, to regulatory, technology, ideation, proposition development , through to launch and growth
  • The new venture is then led by a seasoned entrepreneur, who we call the ‘Venture Builder’

We deploy specific pods of specialists to focus effort on specific steps in the venture build

  • Differing skillsets are needed at different stages in a new venture’s evolution
  • We need ideation pods when the idea concept-forming is happening
  • We need researchers to spring into action when we are chasing down assumptions or creating A/B tests
  • We need banking system and credit bureau people when considering integration to legacy systems and data sources
  • All pods work under the unified direction of the Venture Builder

We make our geographic advantage count as a force multiplier

  • E.g. – working in Helsinki, we hand over wireframes created that day in an ideation session to one of our prototyping teams in California who gets the prototype built and hands it back to the team in Finland by 7 AM the next day Finish time.  The 10 hour time difference make this a breeze for us.
  • E.g. – handing over market research data compiled by one of our teams in London to our analysts in Bangalore for deeper analysis and overnight turnaround.

Our pods = fintech + financial services subject matter experts

  • A pod of fintech engineers and entrepreneurs typically won’t know how to answer complex banking regulation questions
  • A pod of credit risk or fraud domain experts typically won’t know the latest tools for web backend development
  • But together, the results can be amazing.  Designs, decisions and solutions are made much faster when the teams have the right blend of domain expertise
  • We pay close attention to ensuring the optimal expertise mix exists for each pod in each stage of the venture buildout

Some of our areas of domain expertise

BANKING & PAYMENTS

  • Card processing systems
  • Core banking systems
  • Credit bureaus
  • Credit risk & fraud management
  • Open Banking
  • P2P / A2A
  • Payment networks
  • Payment transaction analytics
  • Regulatory, compliance & legal

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

  • Business model design & pricing strategy
  • CX/UX design
  • Go-to-market
  • Ideation & strategic storytelling
  • Proposition creation
  • Prototyping & proof of concept development
  • Rapid product development

ANALYTICS & SYSTEMS

  • 360° customer data integration
  • AI & data mining
  • CRM
  • Data mining, predictive modeling & segmentation
  • Financial modeling
  • Realtime personalization
  • Reporting, business intelligence & data visualization

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT

  • Customer acquisitions 
  • Digital marketing
  • Existing customer management
  • Early Month on Book / customer activation
  • Geo-location, geo-fencing, geo-conquesting
  • Loyalty & reward programs
  • Mobile commerce & mobile/PC banking
Our Leadership Team

Globally distributed management team with deep experience in building new ventures in the financial services space

managing partner

Consumer & Business Banking, Payments & Credit

Vince Bowey

Specialist in product innovation, new ventures development, fintech solutions and startups

practice lead

Retail Banking, Consumer Lending & Payments

James Kershaw

Specialist in new propositions development, business transformation and go to market strategies

practice lead

Business Banking & Commercial Payments

Mathew Stewart

Specialist in B2B verticals and commercial payment solutions

corporate entrepreneur

Fintech, online marketplaces and Open Banking

Robert Kenley

Specialist in building innovative growth propositions and launching new corporate ventures

development partner

Software Development, Data Engineering & Analytics

Srihari Allamsetti

Leads agile development teams for prototyping, through proof of concept and full enterprise technology & data solutions deployment.

 

fintech asia-pac

Digital Payments, Blockchain & AI

Joe Tusin

Specialist in cloud computing, analytics and predictive modeling, CX, in fintech & international payments

practice lead

Venture Capital & Structured Finance

Jim Ameduri

Specialist in capital markets, capital stack design for startups, financial engineering and global investing