ACI Worldwide to Acquire Cranium Ventures for Card Switch

ACI Worldwide has agreed to acquire Cranium Ventures, a UK developer of cloud-native card switching technology. Under the agreement, ACI will take ownership of Cranium’s technology, intellectual property and commercial relationships. Co-founders Ashraf Dimitri and Tony Horrell will join ACI as part of the transaction. Cranium operates in the UK and has teams in Singapore and Malaysia. Financial terms were not disclosed.

ACI plans to integrate Cranium’s microservices-based card switching framework into ACI Connetic for Cards, the card processing component of its ACI Connetic platform. ACI Connetic, launched last year, is a cloud-native payments orchestration platform that combines account-to-account payments, card processing and AI-driven fraud prevention on a single architecture.

Cranium’s switching framework is designed to run in cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. Its microservices architecture supports modular deployment and faster updates compared with monolithic switches and is intended to provide deployment flexibility for banks and processors.

ACI expects the acquired technology and the incoming team to accelerate delivery of card switching features within Connetic and to expand options for customers adopting cloud-native payment infrastructure.

Thomas Warsop, ACI Worldwide’s chief executive, commented: “Card processing is one of the hardest modernization problems left in payments, and we have been working on it for years. Financial institutions need more than a switch. They need intelligence embedded throughout the payment lifecycle, and that is what we built ACI Connetic to deliver. ACI Connetic for Cards is already in market, and Cranium Ventures moves that work forward faster. It will further strengthen our competitive position in cloud-native switching and payment solutions, consistent with our focus on expanding our strategic growth platform.”