Payment Processing

Tech that Expects Change for Certegy Payment Solutions

Certegy provides ACH-based low risk & low cost transactions for consumers and businesses.

Challenge: Development without Disruption

The digital or “noncash” segment makes up over 80% of all transactions. Of those digital transactions, nearly 20% are run through the ACH network, 6.5% are e-checks, and the remainder credit card payments. In 2021, $72.6 trillion was processed via the ACH network. One of the leaders in ACH and check payment processing in North America is Certegy, who has been providing payment and risk management technology to over 4,000 retailers, corporations, and financial institutions for over 60 years. During the past three decades, the company has built up a suite of proprietary systems to enable payment processing at over 100,000 retail locations. To stay ahead of market demands, Certegy sought to expand the capabilities of its technology. Unfortunately, the size and complexity of the company’s legacy COBOL applications and multitude of customer integrations made significant modifications to the existing systems high risk for customer disruption and costs prohibitively high.

Solution: Tech that Expects Change

To add new functionality to the company’s systems without disturbing existing technology or disrupting customers, Certegy’s original project scope called for development of multiple independent software applications which would each call out to various legacy systems for core functionality.

Working with the Certegy team to understand the company’s data flows and integrations at a granular level, Sourcetoad engineers designed and implemented an alternative platform approach wherein custom middleware would be built within an AWS cloud layer on top of the existing systems. This middleware would standardize the ACH payment interface, allowing all existing and future applications to work together without disturbing the core legacy technology or requiring new standalone development projects for each new feature Certegy introduced.

In addition, Sourcetoad developed a full SDK to enable Certegy’s developers and clients to build their own applications. By building a solution that expects and is ready for change instead of independent, purpose-built applications with a single function, Sourcetoad provided Certegy with a flexible technology stack able to adapt as needs change and new functionality is needed.

Results



Lower Costs:

Sourcetoad’s approach enabled Certegy to add functionality to its products as features of the platform instead of independent projects, which cost less than 50% of Certegy’s original project budget.



Faster Development:

The platform approach meant add-on functionality could be developed in months instead of years, enabling the introduction of four new “products” in a single year.



Rapid Onboarding:

New products were not only live, but fully viable in record time. Certegy was able to bring clients online with new functionality within weeks of going live.

Next Case Study

Ready to bring your idea to life?

With more than 15 years of experience, we have helped numerous remarkable companies in realizing their aspirations.

Why not let us build yours?