ACI and Cognizant test card processing on AWS in cloud push

A joint AWS performance test signals banks may no longer need to build from scratch to move card processing to the cloud.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sun, 11 October 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A server rack with multiple units displaying blue glowing lights and neatly tied cables stands in a brightly lit, modern laboratory furnished with desks, monitors, windows, and wall cabinets.

ACI Worldwide and Cognizant have published results from a joint performance test that could accelerate one of banking's most stubborn modernisation debates: whether institutions can move core card processing workloads to public cloud infrastructure without sacrificing the resilience their payment volumes demand.

In a non-production environment, Cognizant deployed ACI's BASE24-eps card software on Amazon EC2 with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, then ran simulated point-of-sale load through it. The system sustained more than double its target transaction volume for 30 minutes and processed over 4.6 million transactions without a single failure. Observability was instrumented to the OpenTelemetry standard and monitored through Amazon CloudWatch, giving operations teams a live view of transaction flow and system health throughout.

The legacy-software angle matters

The detail that distinguishes this test from earlier cloud-payment proofs of concept is the software itself. BASE24-eps is already processing card payments for financial institutions globally; this is not a greenfield platform purpose-built for cloud deployment. The conventional assumption has been that a cloud migration requires adopting a newly built system, a multi-year programme carrying its own cost and delivery risk. This test puts that assumption under pressure by demonstrating that an established, production-grade codebase can be automated onto managed AWS services by an experienced integration partner.

That matters to bank technology leaders because it reframes the migration decision. Rather than choosing between incumbent infrastructure and a complete platform replacement, a third path is now evidenced: lift a trusted codebase into a managed cloud environment, validate it under load, and then proceed to the additional production requirements. Those requirements remain significant. Payment network certification, resilience across availability zones, failover and disaster recovery testing, and security hardening are all still ahead of any institution moving from test to live. The press release is explicit on this point, and the distinction is worth preserving: the test answered a narrower question about sustained load on managed services, not the full production readiness question.

"Banks do not move payment systems on optimism. They move on evidence," said Nitin Bahl, Strategic Business Unit Head, Fintech and Payments at Cognizant. "Our engineers built a working environment on AWS and ran sustained load through it."

The macro cost pressure behind the test

The financial logic driving cloud interest in banking is not subtle. Accenture estimates that close to 70% of bank IT spending goes to maintaining existing systems and regulatory compliance, leaving a shrinking share for growth investment. McKinsey puts cloud's potential value for Fortune 500 financial institutions at between $60 billion and $80 billion in run-rate EBITDA by 2030. Both figures are projections and carry the usual uncertainty of vendor-adjacent research, but the directional pressure is consistent with what bank technology budgets have shown for several years: the cost of keeping legacy infrastructure running crowds out modernisation capital.

For cross-sector investors, the convergence dynamic here is the collision between hyperscaler infrastructure strategy and financial services core systems. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have all invested heavily in financial-services compliance frameworks and regional data residency capabilities precisely to compete for workloads like card processing, which have historically been considered too sensitive to move off dedicated on-premises infrastructure. This test is a data point in that longer campaign.

The broader second-order effect is on core banking software vendors and the systems integrators that wrap them. If the evidence base for cloud-capable legacy payment software continues to build, procurement conversations at major banks will shift. Vendors that cannot demonstrate comparable cloud performance under load face a competitive disadvantage as renewal cycles approach. Meanwhile, hyperscalers gain another reference point in their push to displace specialist financial-services data centre operators, a segment where capital expenditure commitments are already under scrutiny as AI infrastructure competes for the same budget envelope.