Certegy to Offer Visa Point-of-Sale Check Service

Certegy Check Services offers merchants a sophisticated suite of check risk management solutions, including warranty, verification and collection services tailored to the needs of leading merchants in the retail industry. The combination of Certegys existing services with Visas capability of authorizing POS checks directly with the consumers financial institution will create a very compelling check authorization and conversion service for merchants of all sizes. In addition, merchants incur significant check handling costs -- largely because paper check processing is a manual process today. By converting the paper check into an electronic item at the point of sale, the Visa POS Check Service will be able to reduce costs by taking the paper out of the system and increasing efficiencies. The Visa POS Check Service program is a check conversion service that can route check transactions directly to the financial institution where the consumers demand deposit account (DDA) resides for real-time authorization and settlement. For those checks where Visa does not have access directly to the consumers financial institution, the checks are routed to a third-party authorizer, such as Certegy, to perform real-time authorizations. Third party checks are then settled via an ACH debit to the consumers account.