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May 31, 2023

Nexi uses Azure App Service to modernize its FinTech apps to provide a personalized payment solution to customers

Nexi is a European PayTech company that helps its customers pay and accept digital payments through a complete and personalized range of simple, intuitive, and secure solutions. To simplify transactions and empower people and businesses to enjoy closer relationships and prosper together, Nexi needed a unified solution with more flexibility to allow its developers to spend much less time on infrastructure activities and provide more value on delivering products. Working with Microsoft and cVation, Nexi moved forward to implement app modernization and transformation.

Nexi

An industry-leading FinTech company that needs modern solutions

Nexi is a leading European PayTech with scale, capabilities, and proximity to provide the simplest, fastest, and safest payment solutions to people, businesses, and financial institutions across Europe driving the shift towards digital payments and away from cash. The company offers banks, small and medium-sized enterprises, large international corporations, institutions, and public administrations a complete range of innovative solutions for digital payments in both card‑present and card‑not‑present acceptance, e-commerce, and multi-channel. 

“Technology is a way to scale our business and enhance the value of our services for the users,” says Jens Barnow, Senior Vice President, Group Technology, Nexi Group. “We are a leading PayTech and our competitive edge comes from how we can transform technology innovations into tangible customer benefits, both for merchants as well as banks.” Technology enables the company to benefit from economies of scale, as more platforms are consolidated across the group. Through the cloud, Nexi can scale faster and reduce its time to market as the company expands its business. 

To make good on its brand promise—driving progress by simplifying transactions and empowering people and businesses to enjoy closer relationships and prosper together—Nexi needed a unified solution with more flexibility to allow its developers to spend less time on infrastructure activities and provide more value on delivering products.

Working with Microsoft and cVation, Nexi modernized its applications and transformed its business.   

“Microsoft helped us transition from a pure development mindset to DevOps mindset, embracing you-built-it, you-run-it as a fundamental philosophy.”

Jens Barnow, Senior Vice President, Group Technology, Nexi Group

App modernization and digital transformation through Azure is key to success

For over 20 years, Nexi has delivered FinTech services based on technology. Throughout the company’s modernization journey, it has gone from mainframe, to Unix, to decentralized systems, to x86, to cloud on premise, and now into the public cloud. “Nexi’s services and products are technology based, so modernization has been a natural path of the solution evolution as technologies enabled new opportunities,” says Lars Einar Harberg, IT Director eCommerce Payments, Nexi Group. 

Nexi has developed Nets Easy—the company’s modernized ecommerce payment platform—which is more flexible for merchants and makes the payment process easier for the consumer. “The checkout is the last step in the online store, and possibly the most important,” says Barnow. “Making the payment process as simple as possible ultimately helps the merchant to sell more. Also, the solution is flexible and allows the merchant to, in a very flexible way, add more payment methods to the solution as new ones emerge or the audience expands geographically.”

Through Nets Easy, Nexi manages the payment for ecommerce merchants in a separate and encrypted flow, which ensures that the payment and details cannot be tampered with. A quick and convenient check-out is key for the merchant to keep the conversion levels high, and this is what the company provides with Nets Easy. When Nexi first began developing the vision for Nets Easy, they realized they needed to modernize. “Given our European expansion ambitions, we would never be able to keep up, building data centers and infrastructure at the same pace as our ambitions, so we needed cloud capabilities to help us reach our goals,” says Barnow.

“We defined a proof-of-concept program to use public cloud capabilities, where we wanted to provide a new payment method in Germany in our eCommerce product portfolio,” says Harberg. “We assessed the hyperscalers regarding cost, native functionalities, development speed, and development languages. From our primary assessment, we determined that Azure was the right solution.”

To engineer the right solution for Nets Easy, Nexi leveraged the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) as well as cVation, a Microsoft partner based in Copenhagen that specializes in helping  companies execute their most ambitious technology strategies regarding cloud-based enterprise software solutions. “Easy was already a distributed solution, based on domain-driven design. We helped transition Easy from a Windows and Openshift based solution with relational database to a more scalable solution with a document based data model for multi-regional deployment across Europe on Azure,” says Nicolai Graff Andersen, CTO, cVation A/S. “cVation specializes in Azure solutions, so we were able to help Nexi decide on the right architecture and service based on experience with other financial customers and big enterprise customers in general. The key design principle was to utilize PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) to achieve all the great features that come out-of-the-box with Azure, like auto-scaling, security, operations, etc.”

In addition to the partnership with cVation, Nexi received critical internal support from the AMMP team. “Overall, it was a good experience,” says Barnow. “We worked closely with Microsoft internal architects to double-check on architectural decisions. Microsoft helped us transition from a pure development mindset to a DevOps mindset, embracing ‘you-built-it, you-run-it’ as a fundamental philosophy.”

“It’s always underestimated how much stakeholder management these kinds of transformations include, which is why having Microsoft’s support was so critical,” says Harberg. “When you talk about people, processes, and technology, it’s always the people part that requires the most effort. But technology can help.” Nexi focused on autonomy for the developers to achieve a good flow for the teams and to avoid friction and complex dependencies. “With the standardization and momentum that comes with the Azure transition, we focused on automating more processes and taking another leap forward,” says Harberg.

The results speak for themselves

Nexi reports several benefits from embarking on this modernization journey. “Now that we’ve modernized, it’s a lot easier to use microservices architectures. Previously microservice hosting was cumbersome to manage and operate, but when we utilize PaaS to host microservices we get a good SLA and we have a Disaster Recovery plan that we trust now,” says Harberg. “The fully managed application and data services we used as part of this work were Azure App Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure DevOps, Azure API Management, Azure Web Application Firewall, and Azure Monitor.”

Migrating to Azure to modernize applications unlocked many benefits for Nexi, including reduced development time through increased standardization, and lower costs because of the more dynamic approach to both test and production scalability. “Moving our Easy product onto a Cloud platform has allowed us to roll out the product much faster across the markets in which we operate ,” says Barnow. “With Microsoft, we’ve achieved faster time to market with new customer propositions, empowered our developer teams to do more, reduced time for provisioning to new locations, and become more cost efficient.” 

Find out more about Nexi on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“It’s always underestimated how much stakeholder management these kinds of transformations include, which is why having Microsoft’s support was so critical.”

Lars Einar Harberg, IT Director eCommerce Payments, Nexi Group

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