Worldline is one of Europe’s leading payment and transaction service providers. The group operates critical platforms that continuously process billions of payments for merchants, financial institutions and e‑commerce players around the world.
In this environment, technology is at the heart of the value promise. Every payment authorization must be fast, reliable and secure, no matter where the end customer is located. This requirement compels Worldline to design an infrastructure that combines low latency, high availability, maximum security and global scalability.
It is in this context that Worldline’s technical teams embarked on a major transformation of their cloud architecture and data foundation, relying on Exadata deployed on Google Cloud (Oracle Database@Google Cloud).
A cloud strategy built close to the customers
Worldline is committed to serving global customers with the best local performance everywhere in the world.
“We want to offer our customers top‑tier services in terms of low latency and very high availability,” explains Arni Smit, Tech Leader at Worldline. “This ambition means relying on partners capable of delivering global coverage, not only for compute and storage, but also for critical databases.”
In e‑commerce, performance directly affects conversion rates. For transactions, the goal is to obtain a payment authorization in less than one second. Yet, in a global architecture, latency can quickly impact this performance commitment.
“If a step in the authorization process requires crossing the Atlantic, that adds 500 milliseconds, potentially doubling response time,” confirms Arni Smit. “That’s precisely what we aim to avoid.”
For Worldline, it is therefore essential that the platform handling payments is located as close as possible to the merchant’s e‑commerce platform.
A demanding selection process, with no compromises
After launching its Move to Cloud program a few years ago, Worldline selected Google Cloud as its preferred public cloud infrastructure. Because its operations rely on a fast, reliable multi-region, multi-write database, the company recently decided to migrate its Oracle‑managed databases as well.
But before renewing a contract or evolving a critical architecture, Worldline does not hesitate to put its partners in competition.
“We want to make sure we are always using the best solution before committing for many years.”
The teams evaluated several alternatives to Oracle, including Google Cloud native services such as Cloud Spanner, as well as different approaches for running Oracle databases near GCP regions, notably via bare metal solutions. They also considered autonomous database options before reaching a clear conclusion: Exadata on Google Cloud offered the best compromise.
“This approach combines the flexibility of a cloud partner like Google with the power and simplicity of Exadata, as if we had our own data center, but in the cloud,” says Arni Smit.
Worldline also observed the benefits of smooth communication between Oracle and Google, both during testing and throughout deployment — a testament to the maturity of the partnership between the two players:
“The collaboration between Oracle and Google was one of the project’s strengths: accessible, responsive teams focused on solutions.”
Performance as a decisive factor
The choice of Oracle Database@Google Cloud came after extensive trials of the solution. Worldline’s teams were able to evaluate real‑world performance with support from Oracle and Google experts.
“Our philosophy is simple: the database must never become a bottleneck that limits application performance or growth.”
The volumes to be processed are substantial: a reporting database of nearly 100 terabytes, retaining seven years of history to meet regulatory requirements; smaller transactional databases (20–25 TB) subject to highly complex processing; and hundreds of APIs per second to be handled without service degradation.
One of Worldline’s major challenges involves running databases concurrently across multiple sites.
“That is precisely where most traditional relational database systems show their limits,” notes Arni Smit.
Historically, the teams already relied on bidirectional replication mechanisms to set up active‑active architectures. This ability to process transactions in parallel is essential to ensuring availability and geographic proximity. With Exadata on Google Cloud, this approach is strengthened by an infrastructure designed natively for scale‑out, resilience and continuity of service.
Handling peak loads with confidence
In global e‑commerce, peak loads are not the exception: Black Friday, holiday sales, and increasingly frequent promotions can multiply traffic by 10x or even 25x at the same time around the world. Exadata’s near‑instant scalability played a key role in the decision.
“When needed during activity peaks, the Exadata environment is ready in minutes,” says Arni Smit. “That agility is a real game‑changer.”
Security and trust: absolute prerequisites
Another essential point in the decision was data security. Worldline applies extremely high standards in this domain, regardless of the environment.
“Our customers entrust us with their data. We must treat it as if it were our own.”
Data encryption at rest and in transit, strict security policies, and multi‑tenant segmentation mechanisms are at the core of the setup. Oracle’s native security features, integrated with Exadata, met these requirements without added complexity.
“Security is also about segregation,” explains Arni Smit. “Ensuring that each entity is properly isolated is critical, and it was relatively simple to set up, even in a cloud environment.”
Transformation in the service of customers
In the short and medium term, the project delivers on two major objectives for Worldline: gaining flexibility that can support growth, and relying on a truly modular, scalable platform ready for future use cases.
Reporting performance, in particular, has already shown very encouraging signs. Exadata’s ability to automatically optimize critical queries is transforming how teams conceive data usage.
“What sets Exadata apart is its ability to deliver extremely fast query execution,” recalls Arni Smit. “Much of the optimization is handled automatically, which is a real advancement.”
The migration of the Global Collect platform, which comprises around 200 micro‑services, marks a first structuring step. Further deployments are already planned in new regions to bring processing systems closer to end users and continue the optimization trajectory.
Arni Smit concludes by placing this migration’s strategic dimension into perspective:
“A company like ours does not invest in a technology stack for prestige or simply to be part of a community of users. This kind of transformation must be driven by a clear strategy and aligned with the services we provide to our clients. Its purpose is to strengthen our technology stack and take the platform to the next level. In the end, it’s all about trust: the trust our customers place in us, and the trust we place in our partners.”