How Lumen facilitates faster, frictionless transactions for Certegy Payment Solutions

In today’s fast-paced world, customers expect a seamless and secure purchasing experience. Even brief delays can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction. Certegy Payment Solutions, a payment authorization company, helps eliminate these issues with platforms that efficiently process and verify transactions. With Certegy, businesses and consumers can confidently accept or deliver payments, knowing they are protected.

“Our technology is what our customers consume,” says Colby Thames, Chief Technology Officer at Certegy Payment Solutions. “If our technology isn’t on point—if it’s lagging or taking too long—our customers’ customers wind up being impacted. For us, customer experience is enabling our merchants to have world-class payment experiences.”

Certegy enhances everyday payments by providing financial technologies that foster trust and safety in transactions, while minimizing business risk. The payment landscape has evolved to include more online payments, digital wallets and gaming purchases, and keeping pace with these advancements required Certegy to move to the cloud.

A move to the cloud reveals new challenges

A significant part of Certegy’s cloud adoption involved migrating the infrastructure of some of their larger customers to a new provider. This move revealed issues—some involving data technology, others involving their cloud connection.

Resiliency was a major concern. Many of Certegy’s customers have Certegy technology embedded in their data centers. To handle the high volume of transactions efficiently, Thames and his team needed to ensure maximum certainty and resiliency.

As these issues began to surface, Thames and his team realized the need for an integrated partner to assist in problem-solving.

Lumen quickly became their top choice, offering an end-to-end solution that further limited risk and increased resiliency for Certegy’s customers.

Moving forward with a multi-cloud solution

Lumen played an instrumental role in Certegy’s decision to adopt a multi-cloud solution through Lumen® Cloud Connect.

“We can go from cloud to cloud with a couple of major platform providers in a way that’s resilient and connected to both,” Thames explains.

Lumen® Cloud Connect allows Certegy to help reduce operating costs while maintaining high service levels. It is central to Certegy’s migration strategy, offering greater visibility, network controls and built-in automation. This secure, private network ecosystem enables seamless connections to other cloud environments in minutes instead of weeks.

“We’ve had good results with maintaining our consistency of delivery while changing things in the background,” Thames shares. “That multi-cloud approach was only possible with Cloud Connect.”

More than 4,000+ retailers, corporations and financial institutions trust Certegy to control loss and increase revenue across more than 100,000 retail locations. For each transaction, Certegy performs a risk analysis of payment details and the purchaser’s financial history, and their predictive risk engine identifies instances of account abuse and fraud, such as check forgeries, counterfeits and alterations. Completed in less than a second, this comprehensive assessment delivers immediate recommendations to accept or decline a payment, minimizing loss. This process requires secure, point-to-point connectivity between client locations, data centers and Cloud Providers. For that, Certegy relies on Lumen® IP VPN and MPLS Network Service, specifically Dynamic Connections.

“Being able to roll out and use multiple Lumen products has been helpful since we don’t have to go and talk to several different providers along the way,” says Thames.

Designing solutions with a “one-size-fits-any” approach

When choosing Lumen, Certegy anticipated a seamless cloud migration. But another measure of success is when Certegy’s own customers don’t notice a change to their performance.

A three-second delay in a checkout process doesn’t seem significant, but the longer the delay, the more feedback Certegy receives. “We are looking to continuously drive down that latency and our responses,” Thames explains. “The benefit we see from working with Lumen is that we’re able to make the needed changes without any sort of customer friction.”

With Lumen, Certegy has unlocked a versatile solution that lets them tailor experiences based on customer needs. They continue to collaborate to ensure a safer future for electronic commerce.

“The biggest benefit of working with Lumen is having a partner who’s got breadth, capability and the flexibility to work with us to design solutions. Lumen has been there every step of the way, working with us and our customers, making sure that we can provide a solution that makes the most sense for everyone,” Thames says.

Certegy didn’t just find a service provider in Lumen—they found a partner dedicated to delivering tailored, frictionless solutions that keep them at the forefront of payment innovation. Together, Certegy and their customers work to increase profitability and consumer satisfaction while developing secure payment options for peace of mind.

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¹Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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