Nexi Signs 5-Year IBM Contract to Modernize Core Infrastructure

Nexi has signed a five-year agreement with IBM to modernize its core payment processing platform.

The partnership will see the Milan-based European payment technology firm deploy IBM’s z16 technology platform to transform Nexi’s core infrastructure, which is being upgraded to a hybrid cloud architecture.

“The agreement with IBM is part of our infrastructure modernization plan and allows us to improve operational efficiency and drive innovation while offering higher levels of resilience and security to respond even more effectively to the ever-increasing needs of customers,” Nexi Group CIO Giuseppe Dallona said in a Tuesday (Jan. 17) press release.

“Thanks to this collaboration, IBM will support Nexi on its growth path by providing resilient, secure and efficient technologies alongside a deep understanding of the financial sector,” added Nico Losito, vice president, IBM Technology, Italy. “This will help Nexi accelerate the modernization of digital payments to improve customer experience while helping reduce the emissions of CO2 to foster a sustainable digital transformation.”

With its enhanced processing capacity, IBM has been touting z16 as the next generation of FinTech hardware thanks to its integrated artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator that it says can detect and prevent fraud faster and more efficiently than older technologies.

“IBM is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-critical data lives,” Ric Lewis, senior vice president of IBM Systems, said in a statement last April.

While machine learning can run on any type of processor, the specific computing capabilities required has become increasingly important, fueling the growth of more efficient computing architectures such as z16.

Lewis’ comments on inferencing refer to the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) models to apply logical rules to a knowledge base to evaluate and analyze new information. For maximum efficiency, AI inference is increasingly being applied at the point and time that data is being sensed, captured or created.

For example, IBM claims that its on-chip AI acceleration can deliver 300 billion inference operations per day, a dramatic improvement on other solutions. By embedding AI-specific features deeper into a business’ tech stack at the hardware layer, IBM is hoping that z16 will help companies like Nexi deploy more powerful AI models and stay one step ahead of cyber threats.

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