Migrate Tokenized Card Data

As you onboard new clients, their prior software provider may have had a variety of different payments providers. To minimize impact on your merchant’s customers, you can export tokenized card data from other providers and import those tokens into Payabli. The migration process depends somewhat on the other processor’s method of sending the data and how their data is converted. For example, they may have a unique identifier for each customer or card that’s different from Payabli identifiers.

What you should expect during a migration depends on who your former processor is. This guide walks through the general, high-level migration steps.

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Set expectations with your merchants

Set expectations for your merchant during this process. The migration of tokenized data itself can take as little as a couple of hours, but the full process takes several days. Delays in receiving data from the outgoing provider, time spent updating data formats, and more can impact migration timelines.

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Process overview

There’s some variation between processors, but this is the general process migrations follow.

If the data migration is happening at the same time as the merchant switching software partners, you may need to involve the outgoing software partner.

1. Payabli gives the partner Payabli’s PGP Key and PCI SAQ.
2. Payabli sets up an SFTP server for the transfer.
3. The merchant, working with the software partner, requests the release of the encrypted card data. Because the merchant owns the data, the merchant must request the data from their outgoing processor.
4. Payabli securely provides SFTP credentials to outgoing processor.
5. Outgoing processor transfers encrypted data via SFTP. Each company has their own SLA to retrieve and send this data, typically within 3 to 10 business days.
6. Payabli receives this file, decrypts the data and returns tokenized data to the partner. The SLA for this step is 3 to 5 business days.
7. Partner imports the customer data.

This sequence diagram can help you understand the process:

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Processor-specific instructions

Find your outgoing processor for instructions (more coming soon!).