Schwarz Digits has incorporated three components of the Hellgate payment platform into the marketplace of its cloud solution, Stackit. With this move, Schwarz Group (Lidl, Kaufland) aims to offer European retail businesses a more independent way of operating their payment infrastructure. Retail companies can run the services on a cloud system that stores data exclusively in data centres in Germany and Austria.
By combining Stackit’s cloud infrastructure with Hellgate’s Composable Payment Architecture, retailers can connect with different acquirers, payment service providers, and fraud prevention services – without depending entirely on one provider’s infrastructure. At the same time, the solution is designed to give retailers control over stored payment credentials and transaction routing.
Instead of offering a closed platform that handles every function, Hellgate provides individual infrastructure components which retailers can combine with services from other providers. Retail companies can therefore add or replace individual payment services without rebuilding their entire payment stack.
Three Hellgate components join Stackit
”European companies don’t have to trade control for capability,” says Jens Kohnen, Co-founder of Hellgate: “Running composable payments on sovereign infrastructure means a merchant can own their payment stack end to end, from where the data sits to how every transaction is routed. That’s the future we’re both building toward.”
The payment infrastructure company has made three components available through the Stackit marketplace. Link provides a common technical interface to different Payment Service Providers. Specter connects fraud prevention, risk assessment and 3-D Secure services, while Guardian stores and tokenises card details in a vault that complies with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
Hellgate separates retailers from payment providers
The usual payment setup can tie several parts of a retailer’s payment infrastructure to one provider. Adding or replacing a service may then require the company to adapt its checkout systems, establish new technical connections and transfer stored payment credentials.
Hellgate places a separate technical layer between the retailer’s sales systems and the companies involved in processing and assessing payments. The retail company connects its applications to Hellgate, which links them to the selected payment and fraud prevention providers. Retailers can therefore change or add individual services without necessarily rebuilding every connected sales application.
Schwarz Digits extends its portfolio
“Financial data is among a company’s most sensitive assets and demands the highest degree of data protection and transparency,” says Nadja Baulecke, Director Financial Services and Insurance at Schwarz Digits: “By integrating Hellgate into our Stackit marketplace, we provide customers with a payment infrastructure that satisfies the most stringent security and compliance requirements.”
Stackit was originally developed to operate IT infrastructure of Schwarz Group companies, including Lidl and Kaufland. Schwarz Digits now also offers the cloud platform and other digital services to external organisations. The Hellgate integration extends the company’s portfolio into payment infrastructure. Neither company has announced a deployment at Lidl or Kaufland.
Hellgate supports BMW Group with automatic charging payments
Hellgate was founded in 2022 and is a product of German technology company Starfish. The payment infrastructure company supports BMW Group’s Plug-and-Charge Direct services. The system stores and tokenises drivers’ card details and enables automatic payments when they connect their vehicle to a compatible charging point.
