ACI Worldwide and Cognizant Prove Cloud Scalability for Card Processing on AWS

ACI Worldwide and Cognizant have successfully completed performance testing of the BASE24-eps card processing platform on AWS, proving that legacy payment systems can handle extreme transaction volumes in the cloud. For fintech professionals, this validates a migration path for mission-critical infrastructure that avoids the risks of building entirely new platforms from scratch.

What was announced

ACI Worldwide and Cognizant have released the results of a joint performance test designed to evaluate the scalability of BASE24-eps, a core component of ACI’s card acquiring and issuing solutions, within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. The testing aimed to address a primary concern for global banks: whether established payment software can maintain high-performance standards when moved from traditional on-premises hardware to managed cloud services.

During a simulated point-of-sale load, the platform sustained more than double its target transaction volume for a continuous 30-minute period. Throughout the entire testing cycle, BASE24-eps processed over 4.6 million transactions without a single failure. The test environment utilized Amazon EC2 for compute power and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as the managed database service. To ensure real-time visibility into transaction flow and system health, the architecture was instrumented to the OpenTelemetry standard and monitored via Amazon CloudWatch, allowing operations teams to observe throughput in real time.

Cognizant managed the program end-to-end in a non-production environment, handling the target architecture design and the provisioning of the environment using an AWS account operated by ACI. The installation and deployment processes were fully automated, which significantly reduced the manual labor typically required to stand up payment software in new infrastructures. This testing provides a benchmark for institutions that need to manage the seasonal peaks of card processing, such as holiday shopping surges or payday volumes, without over-investing in permanent physical hardware for those peaks.

"Agility and cost are why banks look at the cloud, but they can’t give up the performance their card business depends on to get there. This testing put BASE24-eps under sustained load on AWS, and it ran well past target without a failed transaction. A bank planning a cloud move can start with a card platform that has already been through that test."

Ajmal Syed, Chief Architect and Technical Fellow, ACI Worldwide.

The companies involved

ACI Worldwide, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, is a long-standing innovator in the global payments technology sector. Listed on the NASDAQ as ACIW, the company provides a broad suite of software solutions that power electronic payments for banks, merchants, and billers globally. Its portfolio includes everything from real-time payments and card processing to fraud prevention and merchant omni-channel solutions. ACI is a significant player in the market, with its technology underpinning the payment operations of some of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Cognizant, also listed on the NASDAQ under the symbol CTSH, is a prominent technology services provider and AI builder. The company specializes in helping traditional enterprises modernize their technology stacks and optimize their operations through digital transformation. In this partnership, Cognizant acted as the implementation and engineering lead, leveraging its expertise in cloud architecture to bridge the gap between legacy payment software and modern cloud infrastructure. Both companies occupy central roles in the fintech ecosystem, with ACI focusing on the specialized mechanics of value transfer and Cognizant providing the broad-scale technical services required to deploy those mechanics at scale in modern environments.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has maintained extensive coverage of ACI Worldwide’s recent moves in the real-time and cloud-native payment space. In September 2026, we reported on how Solaris Scales Embedded Finance with ACI Worldwide’s SEPA Instant Payment Platform, highlighting the adoption of the ACI Connetic platform for instant payments. This followed our coverage of the company's technical growth in ACI Worldwide Expands ACI Connetic with Cloud-Native Financial Messaging for Real-Time Payments, which detailed the integration of advanced messaging technology. Beyond product launches, FF News also covered ACI’s market research in the ACI Worldwide Report: Financial Fragility Drives Massive Shift to Debit and Mobile Bill Pay, which examined how consumer economic pressures are altering payment preferences across the United States.

What this means

This announcement addresses the "legacy vs. cloud-native" dilemma that has paralyzed many Tier 1 banks for years. By proving that a battle-tested platform like BASE24-eps can thrive on AWS managed services, ACI and Cognizant are challenging the narrative that cloud migration requires a "rip and replace" strategy. This puts pressure on newer, cloud-only payment processors that have marketed themselves on the supposed inability of legacy systems to scale in modern environments. However, the industry must now ask whether successful performance testing in a non-production environment can be replicated under the weight of full regulatory compliance, payment network certification, and cross-zone disaster recovery requirements. The needle has moved toward hybrid-cloud acceptance for core banking infrastructure.