ACI Worldwide, a global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, has announced a global strategic collaboration with Microsoft via the Microsoft Partner Network to support the payments industry’s adoption of technology deployed in the public cloud. ACI will support the company’s industry growth and extend the reach of its own Universal Payments portfolio through Microsoft Azure.

ACI says the industry has begun to reap the benefits of cloud, including lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased scalability, speed to market, enhanced development tools, and the integration of platform services such as data analytics and artificial intelligence. The cloud, a vital component of today’s service delivery model, enables banks and other organisations to capitalise on new market opportunities and access new channels. By deploying ACI’s UP solutions through the cloud, as well as via traditional on-premises and on-demand implementations, banks, intermediaries, merchants and corporates can thrive amid the unprecedented digital disruption, the company says.

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.

“As global trends, changing business models and innovation create a new set of challenges for the world of payments, this collaboration will allow banks and other organisations committed to innovating and moving to the cloud to become more agile, deploying new payment services more quickly," said Craig Saks, chief operating officer at ACI Worldwide. "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.”

“With the high level of stability, resiliency, and performance of Microsoft Azure integrated with ACI’s payments solutions, ACI can offer organisations the ability to provide a wider range of services to their end customers,” commented Bill Borden, corporate vice president of financial services at Microsoft Corporation.

ACI’s UP solutions offer a wide variety of payment capabilities, including business services such as authorisation, authentication, tokenisation and more, for card-based and digital transactions including industry-standard real-time payments applications.