Cardservice International's LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway Migration Is An Unqualified Success; Enhanced Gateway Capabilities Serve More Than 100,000 Internet Merchants

Business Wire, March 14, 2001

Business Editors

MOORPARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 14, 2001

Cardservice International successfully completed its migration to a new, more powerful LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway, a complex combination of software and hardware for its Internet merchants, designed to securely handle electronic credit card payments over the Web.

Cardservice International's updated multimillion dollar LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway launched on Feb. 4, 2001, after 10 months of intense planning, design, development, testing and quality assurance. The new LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway, which comprises leading-edge architecture from top-shelf manufactures like Hewlett Packard, EMC, Cisco and F5, and includes more advanced software for transaction processing on several machines simultaneously, enables LinkPoint to extend its ability to process more than 100,000 online merchant credit card transactions seamlessly, rapidly and reliably.

The new gateway processes transactions four times faster then it did before the migration, and Cardservice has implemented additional safeguards to greatly enhance overall system availability. In addition, the new LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway architecture ensures that higher processing loads can be handled with no customer disruptions.

About Cardservice International:

Cardservice International Inc. is a global leader in providing real-time secure credit card transactions to merchants. Cardservice offers merchants a cost-effective service tailored to their businesses, enabling them to provide credit card processing over the Internet as well as to the traditional marketplace. More than 185,000 merchants have contracted with Cardservice International. Of those, 55,000 are actively using Cardservice as their Internet solution. First Data Corp, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment services, holds a 50% equity position with Cardservice. For more information about Cardservice International, visit cardservice.com.

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