Certegy Inc. provides credit, debit and merchant card processing, e-banking, check risk management and check cashing services to over 6,000 financial institutions, 117,000 retailers and 100 million consumers worldwide. Certegy’s two main business units—Card Services and Check Services—are organized to enable targeted services and systems that address diverse customer needs.

In a recent conversation with three members of Certegy’s staff (Eric Lamarre, Keith Smith and Thomas Carlton), ISE explored how Certegy uses EnterpriseSCHEDULE to control their Automated Clearing House (ACH) operations.  The ACH network is a funds settlement system used to move electronic debits and credits between consumers, businesses and government entities. Certegy began their search for a Windows Job Scheduling system by demoting several candidates. After reviewing EnterpriseSCHEDULE’s features and receiving online assistance from ISE’s technical staff, Certegy settled on EnterpriseSCHEDULE.

Finally, Thomas Carlton stated that the best thing about EnterpriseSCHEDULE is that “once it’s up and running, you can forget about it”.

Certegy’s ACH operations are extremely time sensitive, relying on real time decisions that are critical in the settling of ten of millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars of check transactions. The timing of the job submission is critical to the movement of large amounts of money for consumers and merchants.

Working with a complex multi-platform system that includes Windows servers (where EnterpriseSCHEDULE resides) communicating with Unix java applications, mainframes and Oracle databases, the jobs create settlement files that physically move money and create reports. There is little room for error in a process that has so much money at stake. According to Certegy staff, EnterpriseSCHEDULE has delivered.

Eric Lamarre mentioned that the software has made life easier as the tasks that EnterpriseSCHEDULE now performs were previously done manually. Some of the jobs run daily while others run only on certain days and EnterpriseSCHEDULE has allowed Certegy to distribute their workload better. Finally, Thomas Carlton stated that the best thing about EnterpriseSCHEDULE is that “once it’s up and running, you can forget about it”.