How Nuvei helped Kovena build for rapid growth in Australia

The travel industry is built on a complex network of booking platforms, suppliers, payment providers, and travelers. Kovena was created to simplify that complexity.

Kovena is a payment platform, purpose-built for the Hospitality and Travel sectors. Bringing together payments solutions, merchant management, and supplier-side operational software into a single integrated platform. Rather than focusing only on the checkout, it connects the entire travel payments lifecycle, enabling hotels, booking engines, travel agencies, and payment providers to operate more efficiently on a global scale.

From day one, Nuvei backed that model, partnering with the business to build its Australian solution in its entirety. Nuvei would help create a foundational payments infrastructure that could support the pace of growth Kovena was targeting, without adding operational complexity.

By supporting everything from pre-arrival payments and deposit collection to supplier payouts and fraud protection, Kovena helps travel businesses automate operations, reduce chargebacks, and deliver better customer experiences.

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The challenge

The travel payments space is notoriously fragmented and competitive, often forcing providers to navigate acquiring, multi-currency payments, fraud controls, and regulation across multiple markets. They often need to stitch together different systems to do so; this would often mean building acquiring relationships market by market, slowing growth, increasing costs, and shifting focus away from improving the travel experience.

Kovena's mission was to enable its partners to expand into new regions, without going through those typical systematic headaches. To do this, they wanted to offer a suite of capabilities to partners, including:

• Global acquiring and local payment methods
• Multi-currency support
• Seamless onboarding for partners and their merchants
• A single integration that could scale internationally

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The solution

Kovena partnered with Nuvei at an early stage of their journey, making Nuvei its first acquiring partner and primary payments provider. This long-standing partnership was about more than just ad-hoc support to enter a single market. Kovena had a technical foundation to expand globally, with Nuvei helping build the infrastructure that would later power their growth across several continents.
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Nuvei delivered a unified platform that combines:

• Global acquiring and payouts across 200+ markets
• Support for 150+ currencies
• Local payment methods and alternative payment options
• Travel-specific capabilities such as split payments and flexible payouts
• Built-in fraud prevention and Level 1 PCI DSS compliance

Kovena is able to embed these capabilities directly into its own platform, and is reaping the rewards. In fact, Kovena's early-stage collaboration has grown into a performance engine for the business in Australia.

Kovena was able to scale regionally at a remarkable CAGR of over 150%, relying on Nuvei’s simple integration, regional acquiring capabilities, and 24/7 operational support.

In addition to eCommerce and card-present capabilities, Nuvei provided consistent commercial models, multi-market facilities, and streamlined data handling, giving Kovena the tools to continue identifying new markets for entry.

However, Kovena's successful Australian integration was not immediately transferable to other markets, and their expansion model would require further approvals and localisation across multiple regions.

As a trusted growth partner, Nuvei worked closely with Kovena to overcome this challenges, mobilizing regional teams in Europe and LATAM to help to adapt and globalize the platform.

This included:

• Rapidly developing region-specific integrations.
• Establishing the necessary legal and compliance frameworks.
• Building connections across multiple markets, at speed.  

This collaborative approach gave Kovena the infrastructure to turn rapid single-market growth into a scalable operating model. As Kovena expanded beyond Australasia into the UK and Europe, Nuvei’s global experience and collaborative, consultative 'white-glove' approach played a crucial role.

The results

Today, Kovena can provide a consistent, premium payments experience across multiple regions, supporting the needs of travel businesses while sustaining the pace of growth it set out to achieve.

With Nuvei, Kovena can:

• Offer unified payment capabilities across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the European Economic Area
• Expand into new markets without rebuilding infrastructure
• Deliver localized payment options while maintaining a single integration
• Support global partners, including channel managers and booking platforms, at scale

This has become a key competitive advantage, particularly as many of Kovena’s partners operate internationally.

The performance impact is central to the story: Kovena has been able to grow quickly without allowing payments infrastructure to become a bottleneck.

“From day one, Nuvei backed our model. They partnered with us to build our Australian solution from the ground up. That foundation now powers our growth, helping us scale rapidly while keeping operational overhead to a minimum.”

Nev Cowley, Head of Payments and Acquiring, Kovena

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Looking ahead

As Kovena continues to grow at pace and enter new markets beyond Australia, they now have a repeatable blueprint for growth to rely on, leveraging Nuvei’s global coverage, compliance capabilities, and unified platform.

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About Kovena

Kovena is a global travel payments platform that connects booking systems, suppliers, and payment infrastructure into a single unified stack. Headquartered in Australia, the company operates across multiple regions, including Europe, the UK, the US, New Zealand, and Vietnam, supporting travel businesses worldwide.  

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