Nuvei announced a significant expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft. Under the expanded agreement, Nuvei’s core payment processing APIs will now run on Microsoft’s cloud platform Microsoft Azure, tapping into Azure’s AI‑powered infrastructure to optimize transaction performance in real time.
This move enhances Nuvei’s global processing capabilities to handle more than 10,000 transactions per second, targeting 99.999 % availability for enterprise merchants globally.
The new infrastructure is designed to support over US$1 trillion in annual payment volume as businesses continue to scale across borders.
In the words of Nuvei CEO Phil Fayer, moving the core processing to Azure gives Nuvei an “AI-native foundation” that can adapt in real time, optimize transaction routing across the globe, and adhere to data residency requirements by region.
This architecture promises faster performance and higher resilience, with a robust platform for future innovations that reduces reliance on older third‑party processing technologies.
What This Means for the Revenue / Payments Industry
High‑Volume and High‑Speed Payments at Global Scale
With support for more than 10,000 transactions per second, Nuvei and Microsoft enable merchants-especially large enterprises and global e‑commerce platforms-to handle surges in demand with ease. This becomes critical during peak seasons, promotions, or global sales events, wherein delays, failures, or downtimes translate directly into lost revenues or poor customer experiences. The cloud-based infrastructure provides all the elasticity needed to absorb spikes in traffic without degradation in performance.
Lower Barriers to Global Expansion and Cross‑border Commerce
Payments stand in the way for companies going internationally, with different currencies, different compliance requirements, local ways of paying, and local acquiring. With Nuvei’s globally distributed, cloud‑native payments backbone, companies scale into new markets without building or maintaining a separate regional infrastructure. This supports frictionless cross‑border commerce and enables businesses to reach new customer bases with less friction.
Improved Reliability, Speed and Innovation via AI‑powered Transaction Optimization
Powered by the AI-ready environment of Azure, Nuvei will be able to optimize authorizations in real time to reduce latency and improve the success rate of each transaction. Intelligent infrastructure reduces payment failures and declines while maximizing authorization, thus enhancing conversion rates and revenue per transaction directly. In turn, such enhancements could dramatically better business margin and customer satisfaction over time.
Democratization of Enterprise‑Grade Payments for Mid-Sized Players
Historically, only the largest enterprises could afford robust, scalable payment infrastructure. With cloud-based solutions from Nuvei–Microsoft, even medium-sized businesses, fast‑growing e‑commerce firms, subscription companies, or fintech startups can access enterprise-grade payment processing — without heavy upfront investment. And this democratization may lead to a surge in small and mid‑sized businesses going global, accelerating innovation and competition in the payments and commerce space.
Broader Business and Industry Implications
Revenue assurance and growth: Each successful transaction is important for a merchant. A resilient, high-capacity payments infrastructure helps minimize failed transactions, reduces friction, and ensures a seamless checkout experience-all key components of maximizing revenue and reducing churn or cart abandonment.
This, in turn, will enable digital commerce growth because, as more businesses become global, need multiple payment methods, and serve customers across regions, a scalable payments backend is a strategic advantage. Cloud-native payment platforms such as Nuvei on Azure will be an important enabler of that shift.
Scalable flexibility and operational efficiency: Cloud-based infrastructure reduces the need to maintain physical servers, regional data centers, or multiple integrations, saving costs by simplifying operations and freeing up businesses to invest additional resources in growth, marketing, or product development rather than maintaining payment infrastructure.
Accelerated innovation in the payments ecosystem: The move will provide a base for other future enhancements, including improved fraud detection, dynamic routing, real‑time analytics, support for alternative methods of payments, and integration with subscription models or recurring billing that will pave the path to a flexible and smarter payment ecosystem.
Conclusion
With Nuvei’s core payments processing coming onto Azure, this extended partnership between Nuvei and Microsoft marks a critical milestone in the development of payment infrastructure worldwide. This deal, amalgamating cloud scalability with AI-powered optimization and global distribution, could empower merchants to process large volumes of transactions reliably, expand internationally with much less friction, and unlock revenue potential at peak demand. What this development would imply is that the future for the payments industry and businesses dependent on effective transaction processing is one where enterprise-grade, global payment capability would be available, affordable, and scalable, thus leveling the playing field for established players and emerging companies.
