Shift4

Shift4 Corporation is a provider of financial transaction and payment processing services based in Las Vegas, Nevada. The company's core product is a merchant-centric Application Service Provider banking and payment gateway solution.
History
Shift4 started as a spinoff of an accounting software application firm for which Shift4 founders J. David Oder, Katherine A. Oder, Kevin Cronic, Steven Sommers, and J.D. Oder II worked in Irvine, California. Seeing that most of their early customers were Las Vegas megaresorts, the Oder family relocated their company and incorporated as Shift4 in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1994.
For its first product offering, Shift4 took on the design concept of auditing credit card transactions prior to their submission to a merchant bank, and developed the Microsoft DOS application $$$ In the Bank (Dollars in the Bank). This software provided the ability to pre-authorize transactions, void transactions later if necessary and to send full data to banks during the authorization of credit cards. The auditing capabilities of this software appealed directly to "high ticket average" businesses, such as hotels and casinos, for its potential to lower the discount rate of business transactions.
In 1998, Shift4 released $$$ In The Bank for Windows. The intended use of this software was to fully integrate Point of Sale software with credit card authorization software.
Shortly thereafter, Shift4 introduced Virtual Leased Line for traditional "card-present" brick and mortar businesses to process card-present credit card transactions over the Internet, as opposed to telephone lines or leased lines. The only use of the Internet for processing credit cards before this offering was from website-based, card-not-present shopping cart software. Neither version of $$$ In The Bank is still available, and as of the end of 2003 $$$ In The Bank for DOS was fully phased out of support.
In 2000, Shift4 developed what is now their core product, DOLLARS ON THE NET, a web-based payment gateway between a POS or property management system and a bank or processor. This payment processing solution was developed using a Software as a service model, and utilizes VPN technology to enable companies with an Internet connection to connect to the gateway. The gateway is used to obtain authorizations in real-time and conduct pre-settlement audits.
In recent years, Shift4 has been a proponent for removing cardholder data from payment systems by using a process called Tokenization, a term the company coined in 2005. The company has been focusing their efforts on developing cardholder data (CHD) replacement technologies to remove that data from merchants' locations and computer systems. These technologies are slightly controversial, however, as their adoption would require a paradigm shift in the way people and organizations look at using and securing electronic payment transactions.
Origin of Company Name
Shift4 describes their company name in the following excerpt borrowed from their webpage: "To solve the Shift4 riddle, hold down your "SHIFT" key while pressing the "4" key. What do you see? A dollar sign.
Reliability
In a 2004 article by Paul Demery published in Internet Retailer said:
The only system downtime that occurred in 2004 was a pre-scheduled 3-hour window during which Shift4 brought live its new state-of-the-art data center. A second data center, with an even larger load capacity, will be brought online later this year, though no downtime will be associated with that go live date. Together, these two, completely redundant data centers will bring Shift4’s system availability close to its ultimate goal of five-nines (99.999% availability), or in layman's terms, less than five and a half minutes of downtime per year.

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