ACI Worldwide inks a strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure

ACI Worldwide has announced a global strategic collaboration with Microsoft via the Microsoft Partner Network to support the payments industry’s rapid adoption of technology deployed in the public cloud. As one of Microsoft’s top 10 global ISV partners in the financial services industry, ACI will support the company’s industry growth and extend the reach of its own market-leading Universal Payments portfolio through Microsoft Azure.

The collaboration will initially enable ACI Universal Payments technology to be licensed by customers for implementation powered by Azure. Through this relationship, ACI on-premises customers will benefit from enhanced security, as well as a reduction in long-term capital expenditure, adopting a scalable model for cloud-based infrastructure-this will be particularly advantageous for neo banks and innovators within existing banks and intermediaries.

Craig Saks, chief operating officer, ACI Worldwide, says, “We have witnessed increased global interest in and rapid adoption of ACI’s payments technology in the cloud from both new and established organizations. In fact, we have secured two significant acquirer clients running our UP Retail Payments solution on Microsoft Azure. As global trends, changing business models and innovation creates a new set of challenges for the world of payments, this collaboration will allow banks and other organizations committed to innovating and moving to the cloud to become more agile, deploying new payment services more quickly. In addition, they can develop proof of concepts, and launch and test them in the marketplace at a low cost - this is already gaining traction among our customers.”

Bill Borden, corporate vice president of financial services at Microsoft Corp. said, “More leading banks worldwide are embracing the cloud, and partnering with ACI on this key growth initiative reinforces that trajectory. With the high level of stability, resiliency, and performance of Microsoft Azure integrated with ACI’s payments solutions, ACI can offer organizations the ability to provide a wider range of services to their end customers.”

ACI’s UP family of solutions connects more ways to pay with more payment capabilities than any other provider. The solutions orchestrate thousands of payment capabilities - business services such as authorization, authentication, tokenization and more - for card-based and digital transactions including industry-standard real-time payments applications. These capabilities are combined in unique ways, forming the UP solutions that perform the payment functions that banks, corporates, merchants and intermediaries need.