ACI Worldwide reimagines convenience for bank customers—reduces onboarding time from weeks to minutes

Bringing creativity to a conservative industry

The financial sector is well known for its cautiously conservative stance. With so much at stake, it literally pays to be careful. And a global payments company servicing that industry survives, and thrives, only by providing the most trusted and reliable services. This is especially true for ACI, which counts 19 of the world’s 20 largest banks among its customers. “It’s all about resilience and mission criticality for the banks and other customers we traditionally serve,” says Sam Jawad, Head of Banking and Financial Intermediaries at ACI Worldwide. “Our software processes $14 trillion worth of transactions every day on behalf of our banking customers. If it should fail, for even five minutes, it would derail a large part of the world economy with ramifications felt in both digital and cash economies. It’s a systemically critical service.” 

The emphasis on solid performance didn’t keep the global payments powerhouse from re-assessing how it offered services from a more overarching perspective. Jawad describes a drive to help customers modernize and develop new revenue streams. Financial institutions told ACI that they wanted to do more than keep up with the industry; they wanted to modernize. “We became a Microsoft Global ISV Partner in 2019,” explains Jawad, describing ACI’s journey as an independent software vendor (ISV) to key Microsoft collaborator. “We realized that the best path to free our own people to create maximum value for our clients was to fully embrace the automation enabled by the cloud. We were certain that we could deploy our solutions faster with Azure.” 

Accelerating flexibility with open-source solutions on Azure

ACI customers rely on two of its most prominent solutions, ACI Acquirer and ACI Interchange, part of its card and merchant management (CMM) suite, to calculate fees and transfer funds from the issuing institution to the merchant. When ACI investigated how to create greater value for its customers, it identified two possibilities: faster creation of the infrastructure needed by merchants who need their software to transmit transactions to financial institutions—often a matter of weeks—and providing rich customer intelligence for valuable opportunity insight. That could mean understanding what factors might cause transactions to be declined, or other issues that constrained purchases, to increase sales. But as Jawad explains, the transaction data from on-premise servers could take days to warehouse, query, and analyze. “Days or weeks of waiting to understand why sales do or don’t happen don’t mesh in our immediate delivery, real-time world,” he says. 

ACI had always maintained a fully on-premise environment with Linux, the popular open-source OS it uses to optimize those CMM transactions. Open-source OS are long-time favorites of the financial industry, according to ACI Product Architect, Prabir Bhoumik, who leads the CMM solutions development. “We use open-source software because it’s invaluable in helping us to connect diverse solutions in an easy, lightweight manner,” he explains. “That significantly drives down costs for us and our customers.” But ACI found that its on-premise architecture couldn’t unlock the full value offered by open-source solutions. 

Unlocking potential for the company and its customers—with Azure

The far-ranging benefits of the cloud over on-premise datacenters, along with the ability to use highly efficient open-source solutions like Linux on Azure, sealed the deal for ACI. ACI trusts Microsoft consolidation and agility vison. “Microsoft is our preferred cloud provider,” asserts Jawad. “That’s why we’re basing all of our innovation and modernization on Azure.”  

As a result, ACI enjoys the flexibility of open-source solutions combined with Azure efficiencies to ignite speed to market. “We use Azure automation to greatly reduce the time needed for every task, thus accelerating business value,” says Jawad. “Our architects worked with Microsoft to build restful APIs that reduced merchant account set up from seven or eight minutes to less than 10 seconds.” And fast access to data in Azure for rapid analysis in Microsoft Power BI provides the rich insight that help financial customers optimize the value of every transaction.

Payment acquiring platform software is monumentally complex, says Jawad, and cloud development is key to accelerating every aspect of maintaining and adapting the platform, and onboarding new merchants. Creating the infrastructure for a new merchant could traditionally take several weeks. Bhoumik points out that previously, customers followed a complex process of procuring and deploying hardware, setting policies, and all the other tasks needed to lay the groundwork for a new system. “The automation, tooling, and templating we access in Azure eliminates the time to prepare an on-premise solution.” he says. “That’s a huge difference for our customers, who can have their entire system—infrastructure, software, connectivity—at the touch of a button.” Adds Andy Shearman, Architect at ACI Worldwide: “Configuring the hardware alone takes about two months on average. With Azure as our cloud and Linux on Azure, we not only deploy the entire system, but configure it for high availability in less than a day. Azure is a great accelerator.”

When ACI worked with Microsoft to optimize its use of Linux and Azure and ingest data via Azure continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, it found the answer to the lengthy deployment times for its payment applications. “A deployment that once took six weeks for our first client now can be deployed at the touch of a button in 45 minutes,” says Jawad. “We have a tremendously powerful solution using Linux on Azure with Azure utilities like CI/CD pipelines.” 

By freeing organizations to focus their expertise and energies on developing added-value payment features and functions on top of standardizing related operational and security capabilities, Azure dramatically accelerates time to market. The unrivaled abilities of Microsoft to manage and scale data security and privacy requirements help transform the fight against real-time payments fraud and advance the industry’s maturity when using data to improve customer experience.

Bursting through previous value-add ceilings with the Microsoft relationship

The financial services industry runs not just on complex systems, but also on trust and credibility. Humans make decisions, and the strength of a trusted relationship matters. “Showing credibility as we deliver systems is massively important,” says Jawad. “The joint credibility of ACI Worldwide and Microsoft in the marketplace will help us redefine the future of payments as we use imaginative solutions like Linux on Azure. That can only happen with a partner like Microsoft.”

He points to the connection between teaming up with a vendor that understands and fulfills the needs of ACI and its clients. “We have incumbent clients who want the value that cloud-enabled productivity offers, and new entrants who want to disrupt the marketplace,” he says. “We can only provide maximum value if we’re not spending precious time on maintenance and patching applications. Microsoft offered us the option to embrace the future and move from a subscription model to a more flexible consumption model, with an emphasis on collaboration. Our relationship with Microsoft shows how an ISV can transform itself while optimizing newly emerging opportunities.”

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