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“Cloudability is one of the market leaders in FinOps platforms, but it’s also easy to use. And that’s critical for us because we have a lot of non-technical users.”
For Nexi, the European PayTech, optimizing cloud spend is a business imperative. The group leverages cloud services to power the solutions they deliver to millions of customers. But lack of a structured tagging taxonomy and actionable insights were making cloud cost management across four cloud providers a struggle.
By implementing IBM Cloudability, Nexi was able to establish a centralized FinOps operating model that gives finance, technology, executives, and business application owners a shared view of cloud cost and usage, forecasting, chargeback, and optimization opportunities, enabling the company to save 20% in cloud spend within six months.
Nexi is a leading European PayTech company offering reliable, secure solutions for merchants and financial institutions that simplify payments and enrich shopping and banking experiences. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, and listed on Euronext Milan, Nexi operates in more than 25 countries, supports more than 1,000 financial institutions, and employs 9,600 people.
Nexi has a vast, complex technology footprint. Its cloud services power the payment solutions used by millions of customers every day, and the company spends over €20 million a year split between four cloud providers: Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Google Cloud.
As Nexi’s cloud spend grew, it became increasingly important for the company to understand not only what it was spending, but also which applications, teams, departments, legal entities, and cloud platforms were responsible for that spend.
When Alessandro Citrigno, Group Cloud FinOps Lead at Nexi, joined the company in May 2025, he was tasked with implementing a FinOps practice across the organization. At the time, Nexi was managing cloud costs in silos. Each team relied on the native cost consoles of their respective providers. This created a disconnected, fragmented view of cloud spend.
This fragmentation created serious problems:
Citrigno described the operating environment, saying, “We had visibility into individual clouds, but no visibility into our cloud.”
To centralize cloud cost management and support a mature FinOps operating model, Nexi implemented IBM Cloudability. The platform enabled the company to build cost allocation models around business applications, legal entities, teams, departments, and services and get a unified view of cloud spend across providers.
Citrigno explained why they selected the solution over other alternatives.
“Cloudability is one of the market leaders in FinOps platforms,” he said, “but it’s also easy to use. And that’s critical for us because we have a lot of non-technical users.”
In less than a year, Nexi’s FinOps practice has delivered impressive results.
Within six months of implementing Cloudability, Nexi analyzed 75% of its cloud spend and reduced costs by 20%. This was accomplished using four distinct optimization levers.
With 25% of spend remaining to review, savings opportunities at Nexi are expected to grow even more.
Forecasting had long been a challenge for Nexi. The company relied on the native forecasting tools embedded in each cloud provider’s console. Citrigno found these to be unreliable. And none of the tools could project costs across multiple clouds.
According to Citrigno, this is one area that fundamentally changed for the better.
“The forecasting perspective of Cloudability is very, very good,” he said. “When I analyze the forecast and then see the actual cost six months later, the variance is around 3%. This is very low compared to before.”
Forecasting accuracy and visibility has material consequences. It enables business leaders to plan capital allocation with confidence, gives finance teams reliable inputs for budgeting cycles, and allows the FinOps team to detect meaningful variance from plan quickly, rather than discovering cost overruns weeks or months after they occur.
Accurate cloud cost allocation depends on reliable tagging. At the start of Nexi’s FinOps journey, fewer than 30% of business applications were properly tagged. The result was a cost landscape that was largely opaque: spending was visible in aggregate, but almost impossible to attribute.
Cloudability’s business mapping capabilities gave Nexi the tools to build a structured tagging taxonomy and systematically close the allocation gap. By creating business mappings that linked cloud resources to the appropriate owners, the FinOps team was able to extend meaningful cost visibility across the organization.
Today, 80% of Nexi’s business applications are tagged against the established taxonomy. This has unlocked cost allocation reporting at a level of granularity that was previously impossible: by team, by department, and by individual application.
Before Nexi formalized its FinOps program, the Group CTO department was absorbing cloud costs for services actively used and managed by other parts of the business, with no mechanism for accurate cost recovery. Teams had no financial accountability for their cloud consumption because there was no visibility into what they were spending.
Using Cloudability’s business mapping as the primary cost allocation engine, Citrigno built a chargeback process that automatically attributes cloud costs to the correct legal entity and team.
“I created different views for different stakeholders—for the executive team, for finance, for business units, for technical teams,” he said. “Each team has visibility into their own cloud spending and accountability for it.”
Finance teams now manage the chargeback process by reviewing cost allocations in a tool that provides the structured, auditable data their processes require. The result is a transformation in financial accountability: cloud costs are no longer a shared overhead absorbed by a central function, but a transparent, attributed expense managed by the teams that generate them.
Perhaps the most consequential measure of Nexi’s FinOps transformation is the breadth of organizational engagement it has achieved. In less than a year, cloud cost management has moved from being the exclusive concern of a central FinOps function to an active FinOps practice across the organization, spanning engineering, finance, business units, and executive leadership.
Each team uses Cloudability differently depending on their role.
This broad adoption is reinforced by a structured weekly cadence. Citrigno holds regular meetings with different stakeholder groups, using Cloudability dashboards as the common toolset for reviewing cloud spending, tracking progress against budgets, and coordinating optimization initiatives.
Nexi has achieved a great deal in less than a year, but the company’s FinOps ambitions continue to expand. According to Citrigno, Nexi’s near-term roadmap includes two priorities.
Citrigno is also watching with interest the continued rollout of Cloudability’s AI-powered features, which he sees as particularly valuable for enabling non-technical stakeholders to interact with cloud spending data without needing specialist FinOps skills.
Nexi Group’s journey is a compelling example of what a disciplined FinOps practice can achieve, and according to Citrigno, the foundation of that achievement has been IBM Cloudability.
“Cloudability is very important for us,” he said. “Not only for cloud cost visibility and monitoring, but also for planning, and for business and strategy decisions.”
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