The first of its kind solution combines NEC Payments’ innovative processing platform with Microsoft Azure’s scalable and secure cloud infrastructure
Dubai, 17 October 2016: NEC Payments B.S.C (c), a Middle East based payments technology company working in a strategic partnership with Microsoft Gulf, have launched today at GITEX Technology Week 2016 a PCI-DSS compliant and MasterCard certified card, virtual, and mobile payment transaction processing environment on Microsoft Azure.
NEC Payments’ transaction processing software has been designed using Microsoft technologies to operate securely within purely virtualised environments and is therefore native to Microsoft Azure infrastructure. This new technology will be available immediately.
Andrew Sims, CEO and Director of NEC Payments, explained: “This is a first of its kind deployment that combines the virtual computing and networking infrastructure available in Microsoft Azure with NEC Payments’ highly-innovative and secure payment processing platform. The solution offers our and Microsoft’s customers security, flexibility, resilience and redundancy, that can be rapidly deployed with significantly lower capital expenditure than has previously been possible”.
NEC Payments expect that this solution will prove especially relevant in emerging markets, where there is a critical need to create and roll-out new financial products to tackle financial inclusion, but where also building and maintaining secure and reliable on-premises data centers can be particularly challenging. However, ultimately it will benefit any financial institution or financial technology company that requires highly-secure and innovative multi-channel, multi-wallet and multi-currency transaction processing and wishes to harness the significant technical and economic advantages that Microsoft Azure offers.
“As part of our ISV (Independent Software Vendor) partnership engagement, Microsoft has worked closely with NEC Payments during the design and deployment of the environment on Azure by providing access to specialists within its ISV and Azure teams”, said Michael Mansour, Chief Innovation Officer, Microsoft Gulf “Thus, NEC Payments not only completed the technical aspects of the project in a short period of time, but also aligned its product offering with Microsoft’s objective of helping its customers drive Digital Transformation and use the power and scale of the Microsoft Azure Cloud to enable payments transaction processing”.
Together, NEC Payments and Microsoft will continue to drive digital transformation in the financial services industry, and improve the performance and availability of services to customers globally with flexible, scalable and redundant payment technologies that can be rolled-out significantly faster and more economically than would be possible with traditional on-premises data center deployments. They are now working together to drive further innovation, and build seamless payments integration into other Microsoft cloud-based business applications.
About NEC PAYMENTS
NEC Payments B.S.C (c) is a Middle East payments technology company. The company provides innovative financial technology solutions to banks and merchants to power high-performance, flexible and secure payment processing, compliance, financial control, and retail management systems. NEC Payments technology may be securely deployed on the cloud, on-premises, and into hybrid environments to provide flexibility, scalability, redundancy, and to drive growth. The company is licensed and regulated by Central Bank of Bahrain. Its transaction processing software is certified by MasterCard, and is compliant with PCI-DSS L1 v3.2, the latest version of the ultra-stringent payments security standard published by PCI-SSC. www.necpayments.com
About Microsoft Gulf
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. . Microsoft Gulf opened its Dubai-based headquarters in 1991. Microsoft Gulf today oversees Microsoft activities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Yemen. Microsoft Corporation’s address on the World Wide Web is: www.microsoft.com Microsoft Middle East’s Web site is www.microsoft.com/middleeast
