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Worldline Taps Google Cloud to Enhance Digital Payments

Google Cloud

Payments services company Worldline has joined forces with Google Cloud to enhance its digital transformation.

“Since 2022, Worldline has initiated a ‘Move to Cloud’ program that includes using the cloud to accelerate its digital transformation into a global premium paytech company,” the company said in a news release Tuesday (Jan. 16).

“Accelerating its trajectory, Worldline now plans to leverage Google Cloud’s secure, high-performance, and low-latency infrastructure, enhancing its operational efficiency, optimizing costs, and improving its strategic positioning.”

Worldline, meanwhile, will act as one of Google’s main payment providers in Europe, aiming to offer Google customers “more advanced payment options, support for more payment networks, improved cross-border conversion, and a more streamlined customer experience.”

PYMNTS examined the role the cloud plays in helping financial institutions in the midst of a digital transformation last year, noting that the technology offers benefits that include increased operational efficiency, improved access to software applications and more flexibility for integrating new technologies.

“Such improved capabilities can easily allow banks to reduce costs, introduce new value-added services and improve the end-user experience to encourage customer retention,” that report said. “One survey found that 44% of bank executives said the cloud’s biggest benefit on offer was the ability to automate processes, while 40% said it was the ability to develop new products and services.”

The partnership between Worldline and Google Cloud comes as the tech giant and its cloud contemporaries are boosting their spending in the face of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.

Capital spending by Google, Amazon and Microsoft jumped to a combined $42 billion for the three months up to September of last year, 10% increase from the prior quarter, the Financial Times reported in November. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that cloud-related spending will increase further in 2024.

Executives from all three companies have said large amounts of the capital budgets are being set aside for generative AI systems that need vast amounts of computing and data power.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said that 70% of generative AI unicorns were using Google Cloud. Between the second and third quarters of last year, the number of active generative AI projects being developed using Alphabet-owned platforms jumped by sevenfold.