Saving cloud spend in just a few months

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:

• There was no integrated visibility. It was nearly impossible to hold teams accountable, to forecast spending accurately, or to identify cost optimization opportunities in a meaningful way.
• The forecasting capabilities of the native cloud consoles were narrow and unreliable. Budgeting and forecasting were managed in isolation.
• Answering simple questions took hours. Business teams routinely asked Citrigno how much they were spending on a specific service or subscription, but without consolidated data, it required a lot of manual effort to produce an answer.
• The Group CTO department was paying for services managed by entirely different parts of the business, with no mechanism to trace who owned what.
• There was no way to compare costs across providers, no automated alerting for anomalies, and no structured process for chargeback or showback.

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: rightsizing, decommissioning idle resources, reservations and saving plans and automated “off-hours” shutdown.

3% forecast variance
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.”

Tagging coverage increased from under 30% to 80%
Accurate cloud cost allocation depends on reliable tagging. 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.

Chargeback delivered to 10+ legal entities
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.”

FinOps now widely practiced by 25+ teams across the organization
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.

• Engineering and infrastructure teams use the rightsizing and commitment tracking features to optimize resource consumption.
• Business unit teams monitor spending against their business applications and flag anomalies.
• Finance teams manage the chargeback process directly within the platform.
• Executives access dashboards that provide portfolio-level visibility across the entire cloud estate.

Looking ahead
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.

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.