By directly interfacing with BT Cardway, Evolve can now offer its customers across the UK and Europe payment traffic routing with one of the UK’s most trusted and long-established payment routing service providers.

BT Cardway is a portfolio of solutions that helps businesses which accept credit cards in-person to secure and manage their networks. It offers a secure, flexible and cost-effective payments infrastructure, connecting merchants with their acquirers or payment processors. By aggregating multiple payment transactions, the acquirer or payment processor is presented with a single interface.

The new agreement, which includes the interfacing of Evolve’s SD-WAN offering into BT Cardway, means Evolve customers can route payment traffic into diverse services via BT, enjoying greater resilience and wider coverage. The pairing will allow Evolve’s diverse customer base across the retail, hospitality, food-to-go and fuel sectors, particularly in the UK, to benefit from its most efficient and secure payment routing yet.

Alan Stephenson-Brown, CEO at Evolve Business Group, said: “We are always looking for new ways to support our customers, and with the scale to transport billions of credit and debit card payments and cash machine transactions per annum, BT Cardway is a great way to provide a wide range of connectivity options.

“Previously, if our merchants encountered a problem with their data centre and were unable to route transactions, it would be a single point of failure. Now we’ve interfaced the Evolve core SD-Wan into BT Cardway’s structure, we can route customer credit and debit card transactions to processors and acquirers more effectively.

“All the connectivity is now live and operational ready for our customers to use, and I’m excited about how this can support their growth.”

The move means Evolve can offer its customers the option to route their transactions to Barclaycard via BT and TNS, and can interface to WorldPay.

Marie Boycott, Head of Payments, BT added: “It’s great to onboard Evolve as a new customer, giving access to the banks and processors we support. The BT Cardway service is used by banks, card schemes, financial institutions, payment services providers, retailers and specialist transaction processors. Now we can also enable Evolve to offer card transaction routing to its global customer base via BT Cardway, and are confident they will benefit from reduced operational costs and risk.”

Evolve was founded in 2005 and specialises in providing end-to-end managed network solutions, including global SD-WAN. It serves customers in 11 countries, including retail, hospitality, leisure, fuel and food-to-go firms such as Robinsons Brewery and Hydes Brewery, and EG Group-supported brands and franchises like KFC, Starbucks, ESSO, BP and Leon.