Migrating sensitive payment data to a new processor can seem complex, as it can raise concerns about security and business continuity. This guide clarifies how Stripe ensures a secure, swift, and smooth migration of your customers and payment methods without business disruption.
How Stripe delivers peace of mind during your migration
- Protect sensitive information: Stripe simplifies your security requirements, ensuring that sensitive payment information is not compromised. Your data is securely migrated through PGP encryption between processors, and the migration process remains PCI-compliant.
- Maintain business continuity: The process is designed to avoid disruptions to your business. You can continue processing payments from existing customers with your current processor while you build your new integration with Stripe.
- Reduce future work: After the migration is complete, Stripe automatically handles card-triggered updates, such as expired or replaced cards.
- Fast-track migrations: Stripe guarantees a 10-day SLA for completing your migration from a previous provider, starting from the moment we receive all the necessary and valid data.
- Get consultative support: Our migration specialists provide guidance to facilitate a smooth transition and optimized integration. For more complex migrations, Stripe’s professional services team can be contracted to provide tailored migration support and consultation.
- Work with an experienced team: You can be confident in our expertise. Stripe has successfully completed more than 15,000 customer migrations and 410 million payment method migrations, including cards, Australian BECS, ACH, SEPA, Bacs, and PADs. We regularly migrate customers from providers such as Adyen, Braintree, Checkout.com, Fiserv, J.P. Morgan Payments, and Worldpay.
Stripe’s secure payment process flow
A migration is not an abrupt switch. Stripe offers the flexibility to maintain uninterrupted operations with your current processor until the integration is complete. We only accept sensitive data files via SFTP after it has been encrypted with our PGP key.
A simple and collaborative process
We’ve designed a simple and collaborative process to provide a smooth transition. Follow these five steps to securely migrate your customer and payment data to Stripe.
Step 1: Set up your Stripe account and build your integration
Available as a contracted engagement, Stripe’s professional services team and paid support—which include an engagement manager, integration consultant, engineer, and technical account manager—can guide you through the process to meet the unique needs of your business, minimize risk, and accelerate time to value.
Avoid disruption to your current customers
Implement the following for all new customer tokens (not imported):
- Use Customer objects to save the card information.
- Collect and tokenize customer card information with one of our recommended payments integrations.
- Create charges for these new customers.
Following these steps avoids disrupting your current customers in your existing processor while accepting payments from your new customers on Stripe during the migration process.
Step 2: Migrate your customers and payment data
Once your integration is ready to begin accepting payments on Stripe, request your data migration with Stripe. We will work with your team and current payment processor to securely transfer your data. Stripe then reviews the data and identifies any data quality issues. We work with you and your current processor to correct any issues. We then share a summary of the import for your final review and approval.
Stripe imports data within 10 business days of receiving the correct data from your current processor, along with any supplementary data files you want to share with our team.
Before requesting a migration
We recommend designing your integration before you ask your payment processor to transfer data to Stripe. This lets you immediately collect payments from new customers and use all of Stripe’s features while we migrate your existing customer data.
- Complete your Stripe account setup.
- Remap customer records.
- Handle updates to payment information during the migration.
- Work with Stripe to ensure all optimizations—such as Adaptive Acceptance, card account updater (CAU), and network tokens—are properly activated.
Step 3 (if applicable): Migrate subscriptions
Migrate subscriptions for existing customers across Stripe accounts. See our Stripe Billing migration documentation.
Step 4: Update your integration and go live
After the data is imported, Stripe provides a simple mapping file to help you update your records to map to the newly imported data. Once your database is updated, you can immediately begin processing all payments with Stripe. We handle the secure transfer of customer data (including names, emails, and billing addresses) and all payment details (such as cards, ACH, and SEPA).
For subscriptions: After testing your integration on migrated cards, switch to processing directly on Stripe and enable future subscriptions.
Prevent payment information errors or billing issues
If customers update their payment information with your previous processor in the window between transferring the data and completing the import, those changes would need to be captured during a second import. To prevent this issue, update your site’s process for handling payment information with the following steps:
- Create a new Customer object in Stripe for your customer.
- Attach the payment method to the Customer object.
- If necessary, migrate subscriptions.
Step 5: Monitor payments performance and migrated subscriptions
After migrating, Stripe will work with you to monitor your payments performance to make sure the acceptance rate for imported payment data matches your expectations.
For subscriptions: Monitor the processing of migrated subscriptions and ensure you have cancelled old subscriptions with your previous processor.
Mitigate impact on payments performance
It’s natural for your authorization rate to take some time to normalize while you ramp up processing on the new processor post-migration. Here are some steps we recommend to mitigate this impact:
- Begin processing new volume on Stripe before cards are imported, so that issuers and networks begin to recognize your new Stripe merchant ID.
- For the first 30 days, send the best possible nonfraudulent traffic with complete data to Stripe to ensure fraud models from issuers can adjust.
- Provide accurate cardholder data (such as cardholder name, billing address, and email). Reflecting the cardholder’s intent maximizes successful authorization potential.
- Store imported payment data and label payments using cards on file with the correct
off_sessionparameter to avoid declines by issuers and to ensure the data is eligible for Stripe’s optimization products, which improve payment success rates. - Work with Stripe on reviewing your issuer decline reasons to identify whether migrated payment data is transacting as expected. Spikes in certain types of declines might benefit from Stripe’s Authorization Boost, which includes card account updater, automatic retries, network tokens, and Adaptive Acceptance.
Read our guide for more tips on maintaining payments performance during migration.
Tailored, dedicated migration support and advisory services
Contract and receive a six-month migration service engagement from dedicated Stripe migration specialists in your region, who will guide you through every step of your data migration to ensure a smooth and confident go-live. Services include mapping existing customer data and designated payment identifiers, defining customer segmentation and cohort strategy, and validating a phased rollout and go-live plan.
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Case studies
FreshBooks
FreshBooks worked with Stripe’s data migration team to migrate the customer data from FreshBooks’ connected accounts in cohorts—based on key success factors such as data volume, system complexity, and customer readiness. During the migration planning phase, the data migration team identified an opportunity to streamline the process: they built a custom migration tool that enabled simultaneous data import into thousands of separate connected accounts, significantly improving the efficiency of the FreshBooks migration effort. With this tooling, each cohort’s customer migration was completed within a day of data receipt.
Sonar
Sonar partnered with Stripe’s professional services and data migration teams to migrate self-serve subscriptions using Stripe’s subscription API with multicurrency support via API scripts. The teams migrated more than 360,900 subscriptions in under 8 weeks.
We had confidence knowing Stripe had done this, and we could rely on their migration expertise.”