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Microsoft has selected payments company Checkout.com to process card payments across several of its biggest products in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, handing the London-based fintech a marquee enterprise client whose business spans Xbox, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.
Announced on 18 June, the arrangement makes Checkout.com a card-acquiring partner for Microsoft in the EMEA region. Acquiring is the often-invisible plumbing of digital commerce — the service that lets a company accept card payments and have the money settled — and at Microsoft’s scale, even marginal gains in how reliably those transactions clear can add up to large sums.
Under the collaboration, Checkout.com connects directly into Microsoft’s Payments API, routing transactions through a single system intended to deliver a consistent checkout experience across Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise lines. Those run from Azure cloud subscriptions and Microsoft 365 productivity tools to games and content bought through Xbox.
Microsoft will also use Intelligent Acceptance, Checkout.com’s AI-driven optimisation engine, which the company says draws on real-time data from its global network to route transactions, reduce failed payments and improve authorisation rates. Checkout.com says the tool has unlocked more than $20 billion in additional merchant revenue and runs about 26,000 optimisations a minute — figures it attributes to its own platform data.
“Microsoft has been at the forefront of every major technological shift — from the rise of personal computing to the cloud, and now AI,” said Guillaume Pousaz, founder and chief executive of Checkout.com. He said supporting a company of that scale “requires payments infrastructure that is resilient, adaptable and engineered for continuous innovation.”
Pankaj Gudimella, general manager of Microsoft Treasury, said the company needs “a unified, high-performance way to accept payments worldwide,” describing Checkout.com as bringing “a modern payments platform, along with strong payments expertise and robust global acquiring capabilities.”
For Checkout.com, founded in 2012 and one of the larger privately held payments firms, securing Microsoft is a notable reference win in a fiercely competitive acquiring market that includes rivals such as Adyen, Stripe and global banks. Large merchants increasingly route payments through specialist providers that promise higher acceptance rates and a single integration across regions, rather than stitching together a patchwork of local processors.
Neither company disclosed financial terms or the full list of Microsoft services covered, and the collaboration — announced from Dubai — is focused on the EMEA region, with no details given on other markets. For Microsoft, the move concentrates part of its regional payments operations with a single partner at a time when a smooth digital checkout has become inseparable from the customer experience.
