Formed through the merger of Nexi, SIA and Nets, Nexi Group is a leading provider of digital payments solutions, supporting over 3.1 million merchants, 140 million cards and 1,000 financial institutions across Europe. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, it has 9,500 employees in 25 countries. Nexi aims to empower people and businesses by making digital payments more accessible and intuitive. Through its innovative solutions for payments, open banking, compliance and more, the company is driving the transition to a cashless Europe.
At-a-Glance
As it prepared to merge with two other payment application companies, Nexi aimed to scale out its microservices infrastructure to meet the new demands of its fast-growing payments solutions business. By adopting a containerized environment orchestrated with SUSE Rancher Prime, the company has streamlined IT infrastructure management, enabling rapid scalability to help complete the merger and spin up new development environments 80% faster.
The journey to containers
Nexi has worked to transform the way people pay and the way businesses accept payments across Europe. To help it reshape the European payments space, Nexi created its own microservices environment to support the rapid development of software for ATMs, smart point-of-sale terminals, mobile payments, blockchains and more. This platform was a quasi-proprietary microservices stack that was not container-based, combining commercial products with internally built components.
As its business grew, Nexi found that its custom-built microservices platform could not scale easily with demand, which limited its agility in developing new applications and services. Shifting its microservices to a containerized architecture promised to give Nexi’s developers greater flexibility, efficiency and reliability. Additionally, containerization would make it easier for Nexi to secure its systems — crucial for a company operating in the tightly regulated financial industry.
Planning to merge with SIA and Nets, Nexi looked for a robust container orchestration solution that could provide teams across all three organizations with a standardized, secure and scalable development environment.
“With vanilla Kubernetes, it might typically take a couple of days to deploy a cluster. With SUSE Rancher Prime, I can deploy a cluster in just a few clicks — around 80% faster.”
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
Nexi needed a single, standardized control plane to orchestrate the delivery of critical services, and a solution with proven compatibility with its hybrid footprint. After evaluating solutions from multiple vendors, the company chose SUSE Rancher Prime as one of its enterprise container management platforms in the Payment Services branch of the business.
Equally important, SUSE Rancher Prime provided the governance and security features Nexi required in a tightly regulated industry, from centralized authentication and access control to built-in observability and policy enforcement. These capabilities allow the company to securely deploy, run and manage modern workloads while meeting strict compliance requirements.
Nexi also found SUSE Rancher Prime easier to manage than other orchestration solutions in use across the business, further simplifying day-to-day operations.
“Our aim is to equip the business with the tools they need to build and innovate,” explains Stefano Bovo, Area Manager for South Europe Cloud Engineering at Nexi Group. “The proven reliability of SUSE Rancher Prime, as well as its centralized management and observability features, are key to our ability to spin up new environments quickly and meet tight deadlines.”
While SUSE consulted on the design of the solution, Nexi worked with a local integration partner, SORINT.lab, to deploy SUSE Rancher Prime across its hybrid cloud environment of virtualized on-premises systems and a managed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) instance. Leveraging infrastructure-as-code automation, the IT team further streamlined IT management processes while minimizing the risk of errors.
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Nexi primarily uses SUSE Rancher Prime for payments, particularly global transactions, which account for roughly 90% of operations in that segment. SUSE Rancher Prime also supports Nexi’s broader platform modernization program. With some help from the tool, Nexi is consolidating more than 25 core processing platforms down to four, cutting its number of data centers from 45 to 15 and migrating over half of its workloads to private cloud — all while maintaining industry-leading 99.99% service continuity.
Enables rapid business growth
With SUSE Rancher Prime enabling standardization across disparate IT environments, teams across the newly formed Nexi Group could quickly adopt the new development environment, helping the company to gain value from the adoption of the solution.
“By centralizing container management with SUSE Rancher Prime, we’ve been able to scale quickly and painlessly, whether in the cloud or on-premises,” confirms Bovo.
80% faster container deployment for faster innovation
Streamlining IT provisioning with SUSE Rancher Prime and infrastructure-as-code automation, the Nexi Group IT team can shift focus to developing new services.
“With vanilla Kubernetes, it might typically take a couple of days to deploy a cluster,” says Bovo. “With SUSE Rancher Prime, I can deploy a cluster in just a few clicks — around 80% faster.”
He adds: “I can see first-hand just how much faster it is to manage infrastructure with SUSE Rancher Prime.”
Providing outstanding customer service with 24/7 availability
Nexi Group uses containers to host several business-critical systems, including payments processing solutions. The in-built resilience, scalability and self-healing capabilities of SUSE Rancher Prime deliver high availability for these crucial applications, even during peak times.
“With highly scalable payments infrastructure built on SUSE Rancher Prime, it’s far easier for us to support spikes in demand for our payments platforms, like during retail holidays,” says Bovo.
This agility allows Nexi to quickly adapt service capacity without disruption, ensuring customers benefit from resilient, uninterrupted services. As a PayTech provider handling over 41 billion transactions annually (covering both the cardholder and merchant side of transactions), service continuity is critical not only for day-to-day operations but also for maintaining customer trust and regulatory compliance.
What’s next for Nexi Group?
As Nexi Group pursues its vision of a cashless Europe, it will focus on developing cloud native technologies to enable further innovation. As it continues this journey, SUSE Rancher Prime will remain one of the cornerstones of Nexi Group’s development environment, offering user-friendly container management and seamless scalability.
“We are now embarking on a cloud-first strategy,” concludes Bovo. “As we shift to cloud, SUSE Rancher Prime will help us stay efficient, agile and responsive to our customers’ needs.”