Computop

Computop Paygate is the payment gateway at the center of the product range, and the Computop team in Bamberg develops the software itself. A merchant connects the Paygate once to its shop system or ERP software and then reaches card acquirers and local payment methods through the same interface. The platform also screens payments for fraud and reports on them, so payments from e-commerce, mobile commerce and the point of sale end up in one dataset.

This is the model of a payment service provider with its own gateway. The settlement of a card payment itself lies with an acquiring bank or licensed institution, which merchant acquiring explains, and the Paygate connects a merchant to many such acquirers at once.

Nexi completed the purchase of the remaining shares in Computop Paygate GmbH on 17 September 2025, two years after it had entered as a shareholder. The parties kept the price confidential, and Computop continues as a stand-alone company inside the Nexi Group. Nexi names Germany and the DACH region as core markets and plans to bring the omnichannel products of Computop to merchants there and in the more than 25 European countries where Nexi operates.

The former owners left the governance of the company with the sale. Since 2026 Kenneth M. Overgaard-Nielsen has led Computop as CEO, after he had joined the management board as Chief Operating Officer in 2024.

In stores, Computop supplies card terminals and connects them to the same Paygate account that processes the online payments of a merchant. The Computop Cloud POS Interface lets a web-based ERP, shop or POS system address a terminal over the internet, without the classic ZVT or OPI cash register interface. A terminal server in the cloud identifies the right device, so the terminal can also run over a SIM card outside the store network.

With Computop PhonePOS, retail staff accept contactless card payments on a smartphone, which follows the SoftPOS approach of using a phone as the terminal. In 2013 Computop bought the EOS Payments business of the Otto Group and moved from online payments into omnichannel payments with its own terminals.

Computop Paygate offers merchants a choice of more than 350 payment methods, so a shop can show buyers in each country the cards and local methods they expect. In total, Computop processes payments worth about 36 billion US dollars a year in 127 currencies, a global figure across all its markets.

In Germany, Computop received approval as a girocard network operator in 2019 and offers girocard in e-commerce. When the European wallet Wero launched, Computop took over the acquirer processing for several banks.

Since 2021, Computop has held the ISO 27001, PCI DSS, PCI PIN and PCI P2PE certificates at the same time, a combination that few payment service providers in Europe hold. In 2015 Computop became the first German payment service provider with PCI P2PE certification, the standard for encrypting card data from the terminal onward. The current card data rules are covered under PCI DSS 4.0.

Tokenization in the Paygate replaces a card number with a substitute value, so a merchant can charge the card again later without storing the number itself. The cruise booking specialist PAPAGENA uses this for about 200 ships, whose card terminals cannot always reach the mainland to authorize a payment live.

Computop Paygate GmbH has its head office in Bamberg in Upper Franconia and employs more than 200 people. Until 2020 the company traded as Computop Wirtschaftsinformatik GmbH, and then it dropped the word Wirtschaftsinformatik from its name. Further offices in England and the United States serve international merchants, and Philip Plambeck runs the UK subsidiary Computop Ltd as Managing Director.

Computop Payment by Link sends a payment request by email, text message, app, newsletter or QR code and takes the customer to a secure payment page hosted by Computop. Merchants use it for quotes, phone orders, sales campaigns and donations, and the service works without an online shop of its own. Card payments on that page run under PCI DSS with 3D Secure 2, the method behind strong customer authentication for online card payments in Europe.

Computop serves large companies in retail, travel, mobility and gaming, among them the car rental company Sixt and the fashion retailer C&A. In 2023 the German toll operator Toll Collect commissioned Computop to handle all payment processing for the German truck toll system.