Dive Brief:
- ACI Worldwide has agreed to purchase Cranium Ventures, which makes cloud-based, card-processing payment tools, to help speed the expansion of ACI’s own collection of card-payment technologies, launched in March.
- ACI did not disclose terms of the deal Tuesday for Cranium Ventures, which was founded in 2018 and is based in Warwick, England. ACI said in a press release that acquiring Cranium accelerates its plan for bringing card-switching capabilities to the market sooner.
- “Card processing is one of the hardest modernization problems left in payments, and we have been working on it for years,” ACI Worldwide CEO Thomas Warsop said in the press release. “Financial institutions need more than a switch. They need intelligence embedded throughout the payment lifecycle.”
Dive Insight:
Cranium Ventures developed a microservices-based card switching framework, called SYNAP, that runs in cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, according to the press release. It’s designed to help replace or modernize older platforms that banks and other entities use to process card payments.
Elkhorn, Nebraska-based ACI said Cranium Ventures’ co-founders, CEO Tony Horrell and Chief Technology Officer Ashraf Dimitri, will join the company when the deal closes.
The total number of purchase transactions on global card networks is projected to reach more than 1.1 trillion in 2029, a 43% increase from 2024, ACI said in its release, citing data from the research firm Nilson Report, adding that “card authorization at many banks and processors still relies on architecture designed before cloud computing was an option.”
The deal is expected to close by the end of September, ACI said in its press release.
Cranium says on its website that three-quarters of payments are processed on technology from the 1970s and 1980s. The “relentless development in the types, channels and nature of electronic payments has led to a 50-year build-up of sedimentary layers of technology,” the company explains.
Cranium’s cloud-based framework is for payments work across banks, processors and payment service providers. ACI said it will support existing Cranium Ventures’ customers after the sale closes.
