Hellgate partners with Schwarz Digits to bring sovereign payment infrastructure to European companies

[ULM, GERMANY] – August 17, 2026. - Hellgate®, the composable payment infrastructure company, today announced a strategic partnership with Schwarz Digits, the IT and digital division of Schwarz Group. Hellgate is now listed on the Marketplace of Schwarz Digits Cloud STACKIT and has joined the STACKIT Partners League. The partnership gives European merchants and financial institutions a route to run payment infrastructure on cloud infrastructure that keeps their data in Europe.

The partnership connects two companies that start from the same point of view: infrastructure should belong to the businesses that depend on it, not to the providers that supply it. STACKIT stores and processes data exclusively in data centers in Germany and Austria, built on open-source technology to avoid technical and vendor lock-in. Hellgate applies the same logic to payments - its Composable Payment Architecture (CPA) lets merchants connect any acquirer, PSP, or fraud service and keep ownership of their payment credentials, with no dependency on a single provider's stack.

Three ideas anchor the alignment: sovereignty, unlocking, and a sovereign infrastructure. Where STACKIT gives organizations digital sovereignty over where and how their data runs, Hellgate gives them sovereignty over how their money moves. Both exist to unlock businesses from closed ecosystems - the walled gardens that make switching costs feel inevitable. And both treat their category as infrastructure to be owned, not a platform to be rented.

"Payment platforms have spent years convincing merchants that lock-in is the price of doing business. It isn't," says Jens Kohnen, Co-Founder of Hellgate. "STACKIT proved the same point for the cloud - that European companies don't have to trade control for capability. Running composable payments on sovereign infrastructure means a merchant can own their payment stack end to end, from where the data sits to how every transaction is routed. That's the future we're both building toward."

“Financial data is among a company's most sensitive assets and demands the highest degree of data protection and transparency,” says Nadja Baulecke, Director Financial Services and Insurance at Schwarz Digits. “By integrating Hellgate into our STACKIT Marketplace, we provide customers with a payment infrastructure that satisfies the most stringent security and compliance requirements. This enables businesses to sustainably modernize their payment processes, reduce operating costs, and maintain full control over their financial data.”

Hellgate's listing on the STACKIT Marketplace makes its payment components available to STACKIT's customer base within a curated, sovereignty-focused catalog. For enterprises in regulated industries - where data residency, PCI compliance, and infrastructure control are non-negotiable - the combination offers a way to modernize payments without ceding ownership to a third party.

The partnership is live today. Hellgate's components are available on the STACKIT Marketplace: Link (PSP abstraction), Specter (fraud intelligence), and Guardian (PCI vault).

About Hellgate®:

Hellgate® is a composable payment infrastructure platform that gives merchants and developers control over their payment stack without vendor lock-in. Its Composable Payment Architecture (CPA) provides modular, infrastructure-first components - from orchestration and PCI vaulting to fraud intelligence and observability - that let enterprises design the exact payment flows their business requires, connect to any acquirer or PSP, and own their customers' payment credentials. Founded in 2022, Hellgate is a product of Starfish GmbH & Co. KG, headquartered in Germany. Provider-agnostic. Interchange-ready. Yours. Learn more at hellgate.io.

About Schwarz Digits:

Schwarz Digits is the IT and digital division of Schwarz Group and offers impressive digital products and services that meet the high German data protection standards. With the aim of achieving the greatest possible digital sovereignty, Schwarz Digits provides the IT infrastructure and solutions for the extensive ecosystem of Schwarz Group's companies and develops it for the future. Schwarz Digits' sovereign core services include Cloud, Cyber Security, Data and AI, Communication and Workspace. In addition, Schwarz Digits creates optimal conditions for the development of trend-setting innovations for end customers, companies and public sector organizations.

Media contact: Jens Kohnen, - Hellgate® / Starfish GmbH & Co. KG Hellgate® is a product of Starfish GmbH & Co. KG · hellgate.io · © 2026 All Rights Reserved