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ETA has recognized three companies with the payments industry’s highest honor, the 2021 ETA Star Awards – Response to COVID-19, presented at the ETA Strategic Leadership Forum. This year’s winners are Celero Commerce, Homebase, and NCR Corporation.

The 2021 ETA Star Award — Response to COVID-19 was created to acknowledge the important work of the payments and fintech industry in keeping commerce running and going the extra mile for their customers and employees in response to the pandemic. The winners were judged and selected by the ETA Awards & Recognition Committee, composed of a panel of industry executives of ETA member companies.

The following is a detailed account of Celero Commerce’s award-winning activities in response to the pandemic.

Q. How did your Pandemic Response Team (PRT) work to provide merchants with the strategies they needed to combat the effects of the pandemic on their business?
A. We immediately divided the company into an offense and a defense.

Our offense was committed to proactively helping our customers — ore specifically, to serving our mission of helping small and mid-sized businesses compete and win. We initially formed a team to observe what creative strategies businesses were implementing to maintain revenue while things were shut down. We spoke to hundreds of businesses and others in fintech to brainstorm ways to help. After learning and forming strategies, we then held over 300 webinars, sharing various best practices, processes, and solution pivots that secured short-term revenue. We created an in-depth COVID-19 resource website, and we made thousands of calls to customers, proactively working to guide them to PPP loans or recommend process changes to help them survive the restrictions. This team focused exclusively on this effort.

Our defense focused on maintaining the health and well-being of both our team members and the company as a whole.

Q. How did you customize and diversify the offerings for your sales and service teams for existing and new merchants?
A. We created strategies for multiple business segments based on how COVID-19 would impact them. We bundled appropriate solution and process recommendations for each and assigned subsets of our offense to reaching out and ensuring that we communicated these best practices quickly. We also outlined each strategy and provided live geographically specific data on our COVID-19-specific website.

Q. How did Celero prioritize its community during the pandemic?
A. In the Nashville area, we partnered with Pinnacle Bank to ensure that our customers had the information at hand to access PPP loans and to access products/solutions and best practices that could help them survive and maintain enough revenue to avoid shutting their doors. We reached out to customers and non-customers with these practices just to serve our missions. We had similar locally focused projects all over the country. As a result of our partnership with LLR and its faith in our team, we were also able to not only avoid cutting our team, but also to take advantage of others doing so; we moved several offshore roles to our Nashville HQ as some outstanding technology talent freed up through furloughs and cuts elsewhere.