Global digital payments provider Checkout.com has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration with Microsoft, a move that will see the fintech company migrate core components of its payment platform to the Microsoft Azure cloud. This partnership is designed to leverage Azure’s extensive infrastructure and advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance the speed, security, and scalability of transactions for enterprise merchants around the world. The migration represents a significant step in the evolution of payment processing, aiming to create a more robust and intelligent ecosystem for digital commerce.
The core of this collaboration centers on accelerating Checkout.com’s AI-driven payment optimization technologies. By integrating with Azure’s machine learning services, the company aims to bolster its “Intelligent Acceptance” engine, a system designed to optimize payment approval rates in real time. For large-scale merchants, including prominent brands like eBay, ASOS, and Klarna, this transition promises lower latency, reduced operational costs, and higher revenue through improved transaction success. The partnership is also forward-looking, positioning both companies to develop solutions for the nascent field of “agentic commerce,” where autonomous AI agents handle transactions on behalf of users.
A Strategic Migration for Performance
The decision to move critical payment workloads to Microsoft Azure is rooted in the need for a highly available and globally distributed infrastructure. Payments are a latency-sensitive domain where milliseconds can determine the success or failure of a transaction. Leveraging Azure’s global footprint, which comprises over 200 data centers, allows Checkout.com to process payments closer to the source, reducing delays and improving the overall speed of authorizations. This geographic distribution is crucial for serving a global merchant base that demands consistent performance across different regions.
This is more than a simple hosting arrangement; it involves a deep integration of Checkout.com’s technology stack with Azure’s suite of services. The company will utilize Azure’s compute, networking, and storage solutions to handle its production payment workloads. This strategic shift is engineered to enhance the scalability of the payments platform, ensuring it can manage fluctuating transaction volumes without compromising performance. As digital commerce continues to grow, the ability to scale resources dynamically is essential for maintaining a seamless customer experience and supporting the expansion of enterprise merchants.
Harnessing AI for Smarter Payments
A key driver of this collaboration is the enhancement of Checkout.com’s AI-powered optimization capabilities. The company’s Intelligent Acceptance tool uses machine learning to analyze transaction data and make real-time adjustments to routing, authentication, and retry logic. This process helps to maximize the number of approved transactions, a critical factor for merchant profitability. According to company-reported figures, this technology already makes tens of millions of optimization decisions daily.
Deepening Machine Learning Integration
By migrating its AI model operations to Azure, Checkout.com gains access to a more powerful and versatile set of machine learning tools. Mariano Albera, Chief Technology Officer at Checkout.com, noted that the Azure platform possesses leading machine learning capabilities that will be instrumental in advancing their services. The integration will allow the company’s AI engine to learn and adapt more quickly, making the network effect more powerful. Every successful payment optimization is instantly shared across the network, benefiting all merchants by improving acceptance rates and reducing costs.
Fortifying Security and Trust
In the financial services industry, security and trust are paramount. The collaboration places a strong emphasis on leveraging Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security infrastructure. Microsoft has long focused on embedding trust into every layer of its cloud services, providing a secure environment for running critical workloads. For Checkout.com, this means being able to offer its clients a payment platform built on a foundation of proven security and compliance protocols.
Advanced Cryptographic Operations
A specific component of this security framework is the use of Azure’s Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). These modules provide certified, secure cryptographic key operations for real-time payment transactions, adhering to strict industry standards such as PCI DSS and PCI 3DS. The Azure Payment HSM service utilizes Thales payShield 10K HSMs to protect sensitive data and manage encryption keys, ensuring that payment credential issuing and 3D-Secure authentication processes are handled with the highest level of security. This hardware-level protection is essential for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of payment data.
The Future of Agentic Commerce
Both Checkout.com and Microsoft view this partnership as a foundational step toward enabling the future of commerce, particularly the rise of agentic commerce. This concept involves autonomous AI agents that can search for products, compare options, and complete purchases based on a user’s preferences, all without direct human intervention. For such a system to work, it requires a new generation of payment infrastructure that is not only fast and intelligent but also fundamentally secure.
The collaboration aims to develop the necessary primitives for this emerging economic model by combining tokenization, cryptographic services, and robust identity verification tools. While the standards for agentic commerce are still developing, this partnership signals a clear intent to build the secure and scalable infrastructure required to support it. Industry experts caution that building this future requires strict consent protocols, scoped tokens, and clear revocation processes to ensure user control and security.
A Partnership for Scalability and Innovation
The alliance is positioned as a co-innovation partnership, reflecting a shared ambition to drive advancements in the digital economy. For Checkout.com, it provides the technological backbone to continue its trajectory as a fintech innovator. For Microsoft, it serves as a powerful case study for hosting mission-critical financial workloads on Azure, showcasing the platform’s capabilities in a demanding, high-frequency environment. Tyler Pichach, Global Head of Payments at Microsoft Financial Services, highlighted that the payments industry is a constant source of AI-powered innovation, and this collaboration will further enhance payment performance for merchants globally.
Implications for Global Merchants
For the enterprise clients of Checkout.com, the migration to Azure is expected to yield tangible benefits. The primary promise is improved payment performance, translating to higher acceptance rates and reduced friction at checkout. By leveraging a more scalable and resilient infrastructure, merchants can better handle peak transaction periods and expand into new global markets with greater confidence. The AI-driven optimizations offer a competitive advantage by unlocking revenue that might otherwise be lost to declined transactions.
Furthermore, the partnership’s focus on building trusted, compliant payment systems addresses a key concern for large enterprises. As regulatory landscapes evolve and the threat of fraud grows, having a payment processor that invests heavily in security and infrastructure provides significant peace of mind. The move to Azure reinforces Checkout.com’s commitment to providing a platform that is not only innovative but also built on a foundation of security and trust, preparing merchants for the next wave of digital transformation.