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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Special Series: Powering Payments Together with Leslie Legel, Dir. of Payments at CenterEdge Software | Episode 436
In the final episode of Powering Payments Together: How Payroc Helps ISVs Scale Smarter, we turn the spotlight on CenterEdge Software and their journey to building a payments program that drives real business value. Leslie Legel, Director of Payments at CenterEdge, joins the conversation to share how Payroc has become a trusted partner in helping them overcome challenges, strengthen their platform, and deliver a seamless experience for their clients.
Leslie explains why payments are mission-critical for family entertainment centers, where more than 90 percent of transactions are digital and downtime isn’t an option. From July 4th waterparks to cashless operations, reliability isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the foundation of customer satisfaction. She reflects on a tough lesson learned when a gateway integration didn’t meet expectations, and how those setbacks ultimately led CenterEdge to develop a more reliable and scalable payments strategy.
The episode also explores how CenterEdge built and branded “CenterEdge Payments,” giving them control over the customer journey and creating a more transparent, feature-rich solution for their clients. Leslie shares how Payroc stood out as a partner, not just for their technology and APIs, but for their willingness to understand CenterEdge’s business, answer tough questions, and provide the tools and flexibility needed to scale.
Finally, Leslie offers advice to ISVs navigating the high-stakes world of payments: do your homework, know your limitations, and find a partner who is as invested in your success as you are. Looking ahead, she discusses how CenterEdge and Payroc will continue to grow together, exploring new solutions and opportunities to strengthen their offering in the family entertainment space.
Welcome to Powering Payments Together, a special three-part series on how PayRock helps ISVs scale smarter. You'll hear PayRock's vision for the future of integrated payments, a behind-the-scenes look at their ISV program, and a real-world success story from one of their partners. Three episodes. One mission, helping ISVs grow faster.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. This is our final episode in our three-part series titled Powering Payments Together: How Payrock Helps ISVs Scale Smarter and is being brought to you by Payrock. In the first episode in the series, I spoke with Adam Oberman about the big picture, where PayRock is headed, and what it means to ISVs. In the second episode, we went deep inside the ISV program at Payrock with Con Byrne to better understand how they partner and support ISVs. So I suggest you go back and listen or watch both of those episodes. Today we'll be doing a partner spotlight where you will hear directly from CenterEdge Software about their experience with Payrock and how PayRock has helped them overcome integration challenges, unlock new revenue, and scale faster. So today we have a very special guest, Leslie Legal, the Director of Payments at Center Edge Software. So Leslie, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much, Greg. So happy to be here with you today.
SPEAKER_02:All right. So before we dive deep into today's topic, if you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about you and Center Edge. So can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your professional journey?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So I began this wonderful roller coaster of financial services back in 2006. I actually started with Fit Third Bank when we were a line of business of merchant services for the bank at that time. And then really worked with them, starting in the capacity of a sales rep role. So getting my feet wet by carrying a bag through our regional bank merchant footprint. And from there, just started turning over new leaves with my career and advancing into different roles within our sales enablement and partner relationships. So where I spent a lot of time was focused on training our sales reps and our partners on the entire merchant service landscape. So pricing, interchange, how things work when you think about the transaction lifecycle. And that's really where I had a lot of passion for the industry. So through that, you know, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of different partners on the agent bank side, on the ISO side. And then as fifth third really evolved to Vantiv, which we now know is World Pay, we started to grow into the ISB space. So I started to get the opportunity to work with our ISB partners to help them become more educated on the industry. So after my time there, I transitioned to a healthcare IT company, a really large ISV here in Lowell, Kentucky, and supported their sales enablement and operations platforms as well as we were a super ISO at the time. So still very involved in that merchant strategy and financial aspect of it. And then from there, I was able to find an opportunity with Center Edge. So I started working with CenterEge back in 2018 to help them really develop their integrated payments program.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, great. So for those who may not be familiar, can you give us a quick overview of what Center Edge does?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So CenterEge is really fun. We are a 21-year-old software company. We're headquartered out of a small town in North Carolina, just outside of like the Durham area, if you're familiar with that. And we are really designed to focus on providing a full software solution for the family entertainment industry. So when you think about our customers, they are multi-attraction family entertainment centers that offer things like bowling, a mini golf, trampolines, skating, all of those really fun things that you and your family get to go do together. We provide the purpose-built software to make sure that we can streamline your entire operation and focus on really delivering best-in-class guest experiences through that tool.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, as the director of payments there, tell us about your role.
SPEAKER_01:So a lot of things that we do on the payments team. So as I'm sure you can imagine, my team is responsible for really everything integrated payments related. So over the course of the years, we've really evolved where we've had referral relationships with some major requirers to really bringing all of that in-house and running our own integrated program, centered payments. So what my team focuses on is the ongoing growth and support of that program. So we look at everything from the client experience at that initial install all the way through, you know, the continued life cycle of that account. We also work very, very closely with our product department and then our partners, which I know we're going to talk a little bit more about, to look at how we can develop new features and functionalities to really make that offering even more robust than it is today. So that's really where we're spending our time is that full life cycle when we onboard that merchant all the way through that experience where they're continuing to process with us and delivering statements and things of that nature.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, great. Well, let's start by talking about payments within your software. So, what role does payments play in your software? Why are payments so important?
SPEAKER_01:So payments are so important to us and play such a vital role within our software because if you think about it, the success of your payments program directly impacts the success of the business operations of our clients. So a typical family entertainment center, 90 plus percent of their payments are coming through some sort of electronic payment, whether that's credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay. That is how people pay for these services today. Additionally, we have a lot of our clients that have now gone 100% cashless. So you think of the importance of making sure their solution is up and running at all given points in time is extremely important to them. So for us, it's really delivering that integrated solution to make sure they don't have to focus on going and navigating through other relationships of dealing with a third-party payment processor or, you know, someone not necessarily being able to pick up the phone. So for us, it's extremely important to provide that experience.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, what are some of the pain points you've experienced around payments at your company?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let me think. We could talk about a few because when you think about payments, it's definitely a very tricky business to get into. So making sure that you have, you know, a lot of knowledge around that is very important to deliver that really extensive program to your clients that's they're gonna feel is operating seamlessly within their software. So I would say one of the hardest lessons I've learned and one of the biggest pain points that I've had through this process was when we made a significant change to look at a different gateway integration to partner with. And so we had gotten some feedback from some of the partners that we work with around a solution that we wanted to utilize. And it made a lot of steps when you first looked at it, right? Like the financials made sense. We looked at all of the development work, seemed really straightforward. Plus, we had had a relationship with this company prior to going into this. So we thought, okay, you know, it's going to be a really good fit for our clients. Well, unfortunately, sometimes with payments, you don't learn that these things aren't necessarily the right fit until you're kind of too far in, right? And so for us, once we got into really promoting this gateway and using it for center edge payments, we started to run into some significant issues as it related to uptime with the solution, as well as some of the gaps that were kind of evident around like compliance and security within the solution. And so for us, we worked really hard as a team to navigate through like those challenges and figure out ways to compensate for some of these missing functionalities. But ultimately, the challenges that this created led us down the path, us making a decision to have to pull back the entire thing. And for many of our listeners and for those who've experienced a similar situation, what's hard is we offer our solution across card present, mobile, self-service, and e-commerce solutions. And so when you're in a card present environment, you've got things like pin pads that you now have to deal with when you're changing gateways and going through that process. And so pulling that back was not only, you know, countless hours of effort with us communicating with customers and working to do that, but also some significant cost as you think about having to redeploy new hardware to our customers. That was a tough lesson and definitely one of the most painful things that I've probably experienced through this process, but we learned a lot and we come out of it so much stronger and with a much, much more robust solution now after going through that process.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Anyone you ever talked to who has had to unwind payments from their operation has has gone through some challenges. And I'm glad to hear that you learned from it and was ended up being probably a positive thing, but painful at the time. So from, and you talked about this already a little bit, but from your customer's perspective, what is the most critical aspect of payments?
SPEAKER_01:This may seem like the simplest answer, but it is the most truthful thing that I can tell you is it has to work. And the reality of that for our customers and for any one of us in the ISB space where we're taking payments on behalf of our customers, we need it to work and we need it to work smoothly. But I think about we have a water park, it's July 4th, it's 10 a.m. It's a holiday. We know, you know, sometimes some of the acquirers, because it's the fine, they're not necessarily always there to support you. So we need to know that the partners that we select are going to help us make sure that this is working and working all the time. And so if that line at 10 a.m. is wrapped around the parking lot and my credit card processing is down, I'm in big trouble. I'm turning people away. I'm creating a really bad experience for my guest. And ultimately, like that becomes the biggest challenge. So payments can't turn off and turn on throughout the day. It has to run seamlessly. And so making sure that your solution, that you've done the work around like what tools you need and the support that you have to be able to deliver that, that is by far the most critical thing for us.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And you mentioned center edge payments. So obviously you've white labeled and branded it as your own. So how does that white label fit into your overall strategy?
SPEAKER_01:For us, when we went down this path, as I mentioned earlier, we had been in referral relationships previously where it was, you know, hey, we know a payments provider you can use and just refer that customer over to them and had great relationships with some of those partners. But for us, like going down this, we wanted to control as much of that customer journey as we could. And so for us, being able to white label and create a brand of center edge payments that is recognizable to our customers and in our industry was very important for this strategy. So going through that process to be able to say, like, look, this is the number that you're gonna call. You're calling into the same software support that you've been calling into for 20 years if you've been a customer of ours. When now, when it's your payments issue, you're calling us too. So creating that brand was very, very important. And so having the ability to white label that really was a key part of our strategy. And so being able to work with partners that support that strategy was also very important to us.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing that all about the company and payments and what you're doing and your strategy there. So let's now talk about your partnership with Payrock. So, how did you find out about Payrock?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was interesting. So, as I mentioned, we had gone through, you know, some different referrals, different integrations. And so we had a little more than a handful of partners that we were working with when it came to looking at like the overall payments landscape for Center Edge. And so as I was working through, you know, different support processes and internal sales processes and things with the team, it just made more sense to think about okay, is there a partner that we could look to, you know, help us consolidate some of these things and really then streamline our operations, one, to create a better experience for our customers, but also better revenue opportunity for us, right? To like be able to align those things with our growth strategy. So I headed out to, you know, the internet, just like anyone would, and started doing some research. But fortunate for me, having come from a payments background, you know, and knowing quite a few really amazing people over that time of working in the industry, I had a friend who said, Hey, like, you know, we were, we were kind of catching up and I was letting him know some of the different things that I was looking at. And, you know, there's a lot out there to be able to review. And he had said, Hey, have you ever thought about talking to Payrop? And I was like, Well, no, you know, it's kind of the first I had heard of them. Um so I started doing some research on them. And he just had basically worked with another company that had talked to him before and so thought, based on what I was looking for, maybe an opportunity for me. And so from there, it really I kind of put their name into my process of going through like my checklist of the things that I was looking for and reached out to them and set up some initial calls and kind of that's how it all started, just from that research.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And why did PayRo stand out as the best fit?
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's interesting. If you look at PayRock as and all of the things they have to offer, there are so many amazing things. They have great technology. From a partner perspective, they have APIs that are, you know, super easy to be able to work with and make things a lot easier for you as an ISB to work with them. They also have been in the industry for a long time and they have proven that they have been able to really continue to grow and maintain their stature within the industry over these years. And so if you look at those things, like it would be easy to say, hey, payrock is a great fit. But for me, when I had my initial conversations with our business development executive and then started, you know, that process of going through understanding like you would have this partner manager and this partner support team. And oh, this would be your integrations person. Every single person that I work with, I just connected with really well. And they wanted to make sure they understood us as a business. So really helping to peel back that onion, understand the challenges that I have gone through with center edge payments and with payments in general, just to see, like, okay, how do we not misstep together? I was asking hard questions, Greg, and they were giving me real answers. And so that to me, it just always felt like I had found the right partner. So I know you've talked to quite a few folks there, and it really, it's just as soon as I started talking to them and hearing, you know, their story and how they wanted to work with me, it just seemed like it was going to be the right opportunity for us.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, what was the onboarding and integration experience like with Payrock?
SPEAKER_01:So for us, everything was really straightforward. We had so many initial calls to really look at how Center Edge Payments wanted to do things and what tools did Payrock have to offer. And I think that's like one of the best things about Payrock is you can look at their library of solutions. And as an ISV, you can say, this is what makes sense for us right now. And then you can continue to build with that. So for us, as we went through that onboarding process, we had done so much homework up to getting to that point. Boarding our first meet merchant was really easy. And we all kind of like took a step back after that merchant went live. And you know, the the very first thing you do is check for that test transaction and make sure that deposit hit the bank. And you're all like, okay, this worked. And so that process for us, because we had done so much initial work together to make sure that we had the right fit, was very smooth. Now, Center Edge, and I think a lot of it, you know, because of just like the experience that we've had in the past with referral partners and just different exposure to payments, we like to control as much of the customer experience as possible. And the great news is that PayRock allows us to do that. So for us, like taking on pricing and, you know, the install, because we're installing software. So we want to install the payments, they're gonna work with us to make sure we have all the tools to be able to do that. And then if you are an ISV that maybe you want to handle that differently, they're super flexible with their integration approach to be able to allow you to do things differently. So I thought our experience was really good with everything that we did. And we were able to get those first couple of merchants up pretty quickly once we had gone through, you know, obviously getting all of the initial legwork done. And um, it's been great. So they let you crawl, walk, or run. So as an ISV, that's super important because if you're just getting your software out there, bringing in payments, very, very instrumental to your growth operation, but you might not want to be able to take on as much as an ISV like we did. And they have the opportunity for them to do that.
SPEAKER_02:That's a good segue to the next question. So at the end of the day, what is the impact to your business and to your clients or customers with having a successful integrated payment solution?
SPEAKER_01:Having centered edge payments has been able to really strengthen the overall platform and solution that we're providing to our customers. One of the biggest goals that I had coming into being able to do this is let's take the ambiguity out of payments for our customers and focus on creating a very transparent, honest, simple approach to credit card processing that aligns with their software to make sure that we let them just focus on this improved guest experience. So we have built on the feature set that we offer with Center Edge Payments, which not only allows like us to provide payments for our customers, but it also helps them grow in other ways with different tools and make things easier. And so you're creating this feature-rich program that eliminates a lot of the friction that is caused when you break apart and have like disparate partners when it relates to your software and your payments. So for us, having that integrated, just it's made it a holistic solution that's easy for our customers to use and come to us for support and help when they need to.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So what advice would you give other software companies that are looking for a payments partner?
SPEAKER_01:I like to say uh merchant services is a high-stakes business, right? So when you take on payments for your software customers, it's high risk, high reward. And so you're now directly dealing with their money. And so I think the biggest thing is ensuring that you go out and do your research and you find a partner that's going to be right there with you through that process. They have to be invested in your success just as much as you're invested in the success of your clients. And marrying that together then creates a really good opportunity for someone to drive revenue and experience with their integrated payments program. So the best thing to do is do your homework, know what you're looking for and what you can take on as the ISD. Because, again, there's a lot of different elements to payments, but you don't have to dive in and take over everything initially at the get-go. So know your limitations and what you, you know, kind of expect up front, and then find a partner who's going to align to you with that. And then you'll be able to deliver what really matters to your clients. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Well, one final question. What's next in your payment journey with Payrock?
SPEAKER_01:Growth. Let's continue to grow together. So for us, we've been partnered with Payrock for a few years now. And each year, we've developed a new set of solutions that we've been able to offer to our clients. And one of the great things about Payrock is they continue to look for innovative ways to bring different solutions that will help us differentiate ourselves as ISV providers as well. And so when I look at that, for me, it's okay, what is the next set of solutions that matters to the family entertainment space? Is it being able to expedite funding or what are the cutting edge payment solutions that are out there today? Do I need to find a new mobile package or different development for these solutions? And PayRock continues to help us with finding new tools, technology that will help us then create that better experience for our customers and offer some different solutions to help us set ourselves apart. So my goal is with Payrock to leverage them to continue to grow our business. And I think that only helps us strengthen our partnership together.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. It's kind of ironic. It circles back to really a lot of what Adam talked about in the first episode was really how PayRock really focuses on trying to help their clients grow. And it sounds like that's really kind of what you see them as, just besides processing payments, they're really there to help your business grow.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. One of the things that I also think has been so great is the open loop feedback that we have as partners together and continuing to share, like, you know, these are things that we think will help us. And they do the same for us. Like, hey, we think this would help you. And that's what is going to help us both continue to grow together. And so that's been really key as part of our relationship.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable. So I really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. It's been a pleasure and thank you for the time.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for joining us for Powering Payments Together, a special series on how PayRock helps ISV scale smarter. To explore more resources and insights, visit HTTPS colon slash slash partners.payrock.com slash leaders dash in dash payments.