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.

To ensure security, Sourcetoad implemented envelope encryption directly into Laravel’s Eloquent driver. This allowed for transparent data encryption and decryption—plus support for searchable hashed fields—without requiring Certegy’s development team to manage encryption processes manually.

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.