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 travellers. Kovena was created to simplify that complexity.

Kovena brings together global payments infrastructure, 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. While Kovena was still a start-up, Nuvei partnered with the business to build its Australian solution from the ground up, creating a payments foundation that could support the pace of growth Kovena was targeting without adding unnecessary 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.

The challenge

Due to the travel payments space being highly fragmented and competitive, providers must navigate acquiring, multi-currency payments, fraud controls, and regulation across multiple markets. They often need to stitch together different systems to do so.  

For Kovena, the challenge was clear: enable its partners to expand into new regions quickly, without introducing friction or operational complexity.

To achieve this, Kovena needed a way to offer a suite of payment capabilities:

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

Without this, expansion would require building acquiring relationships market by market, slowing growth, increasing costs, and shifting focus away from improving the travel experience.

The solution

Kovena partnered with Nuvei at its earliest stage of growth, making Nuvei its first acquiring partner and its primary payments provider as the business expanded globally. Crucially, Nuvei did not simply support Kovena’s growth once it had already scaled; it helped create the payments foundation that made that growth possible.

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

All of this is accessible through a single integration, allowing Kovena to embed these capabilities directly into its own platform. That early-stage collaboration became a performance engine for Kovena in Australia. As the business scaled regionally at a CAGR of over 150%, Nuvei’s single integration, regional acquiring capabilities, and operational support helped Kovena keep expanding without adding the complexity that typically comes with new markets, currencies, and compliance requirements.

In addition to eCommerce and card-present capabilities, Nuvei provided consistent commercial models, multi-market facilities, and streamlined data handling, removing complexity from servicing global accommodation and travel clients.  

Expanding a payments platform globally comes with operational and regulatory hurdles. Kovena’s model required approval and localisation across multiple regions, and its initial Australian integration was not immediately transferable to other markets.  

Nuvei worked closely with Kovena to overcome these challenges, with regional teams in Europe and LATAM helping to adapt and globalise 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 growth into a scalable operating model, while keeping added operational overhead to a minimum.

As Kovena expanded beyond Australasia into the UK and Europe, Nuvei’s global experience played a critical role.

Having already supported Kovena in its early growth, Nuvei leveraged its understanding of the business to accelerate deployment in new regions, reducing time to market and ensuring consistency across geographies.  

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 localised 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. Nuvei’s solution has absorbed that expansion, helping Kovena preserve speed, consistency, and operational efficiency as it scales.

“From day one, Nuvei backed our model. While Kovena was still a start-up, 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

Looking ahead

As Kovena continues to grow at pace and enter new markets, its focus remains on expanding reach without increasing operational burden.

By continuing to leverage Nuvei’s global coverage, compliance capabilities, and unified platform, Kovena can bring new regions online quickly, ensuring that growth does not introduce additional complexity.  

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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