Managed Vendor Migration
A vendor migration is two hard jobs at once: building the integration between your platform and the new processor’s APIs, then moving an entire portfolio of merchants without dropping a transaction. It is the single biggest risk in any payments change. Straata owns both and takes the risk off the table, from the processor decision to the last merchant live.
Backed by the off-the-shelf AI for your payments data, so every merchant is reconciled as it moves and nothing is lost in the cutover.
You already know the destination is better: the rates, the product, the partnership. What keeps the decision stuck is the middle: the integration between your platform and the new processor’s APIs, then a long tail of merchants nobody on your team has the capacity to move. The revenue you counted on stays locked until the book is actually live.
The Build, Before The Move
Before a single merchant moves, the integration between your platform and the new processor’s APIs has to be built and proven: tokenization, onboarding, webhooks, reconciliation, the whole pipe. It is real money-movement software. The usual ways to get it done all fail.
Straata brings the payments expertise, the engineering, and the context on your business and your book in one team. We build the integration, prove it before cutover, then move the portfolio against it, and own the outcome end to end.
The 100% Line
Managed Vendor Migration exists because the middle is ownable. We assess the move, build the bridge inside your product, run the merchant campaign, and report against the 100% line every week until it is real.
| Merchant Cohort | Merchants | Consented | Live | Live Rate | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,240 | 1,190 | 1,090 | 88% | On Pace | |
| 1,080 | 1,040 | 900 | 83% | On Pace | |
| 940 | 870 | 710 | 76% | Watch | |
| 740 | 500 | 420 | 57% | Long Tail | |
| Book Live | 4,000 | 3,600 | 3,120 | 78% | On Track |
The Gap
Migrations get chosen constantly, then die in execution. The reason is structural.
| The Player | Their Model | Stops At | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy firms | Pick the processor, hand over a plan, and leave. Delivery risk is outside their model. | Stops Here | |
| Tooling vendors | Sell rails, vaults, and self-serve docs. The work of wiring them into your product lands back on your engineers. | Stops Here | |
| The new processor | Gets you to a live API and first transaction, then calls it done. Their incentive ends long before your book is moved. | Stops Here | |
| Straata | Owns consent, verification, and cutover as one campaign, all the way to the last percent. | Holds The Gap |
Between "we chose the processor" and "100% of merchants are live" sits a multi-month operational campaign of consent, re-verification, re-tokenization, and cutover monitoring. Every existing business model pushes work out of that gap. Straata's is built to hold it.
The Engagement
Build first, then migrate. Each phase produces something the next one needs, and the first one can honestly return a no-go.
About three weeks. Maps every surface in your product that touches payments, scores contract, token, and verification risk, and sizes the campaign by the number that matters: how many merchant identities must individually consent and clear checks. It can return a no-go. We would rather flag a gap now than discover it at cutover.
One canonical view of every merchant across rails and MIDs. It both tracks the move and pre-loads the applications, so by the time a merchant is contacted their account already exists and the form is already filled in.
We build the bridge inside your product: per-merchant routing behind consent-gated flags, wired to the new processor and tested before anything moves. Build first, then migrate. You cannot move a merchant onto an integration that does not exist yet.
The retainer that runs the move: consent sequences, verification chasing, exception handling, and the weekly burn-up. 100% stops being a claim and becomes a number we report against every week.
De-Risking
No single cutover date, no all-at-once risk. The move is reversible at every step, per merchant.
One merchant, flipped behind a consent-gated flag. Both rails run in parallel until first volume verifies, reversible the whole way.
A single cutover date puts the whole book at risk at once. We flip merchants one at a time behind consent-gated flags, so a merchant that stalls simply stays on the old rail until it is ready.
Old and new rails run in parallel for each merchant until first volume is seen and verified on the new processor. Only then does the old route retire.
If volume diverges, the flag flips back and nobody loses a charge. The cutover is reversible at every step.
Payments that fail during the cutover window get chased as part of the migration, because a missed charge in week two is a churn risk in month three.
Stored cards and network tokens move to the new processor so recurring billing never breaks and no customer has to re-enter a card. Straata never touches the card data itself. We orchestrate the secure processor-to-processor token migration through the providers’ own compliant vault programs, coordinating the old processor, the new processor, and the card networks so the credentials arrive intact and PCI scope stays exactly where it belongs.
Pre-filled applications collapse what a merchant has to do, usually to confirm and accept, but they do not skip the new processor's verification. We engineer toward frictionless and forecast it as a number, we do not promise it as magic.
The Difference
Everyone else hands you a tool and a plan and says: now go change your product. We change your product.
Straata works inside the product, so the chain never breaks: comms to consent to flags to routing, one team through cutover and the dunning inside it.
Orchestration platforms sit beside your product. Vault vendors hand you tokens. Consultancies never touch the codebase. Straata works inside the product itself, which is why the chain never breaks: the flags gate the routing, consent unlocks the flags, the comms drive the consent, and the same team owns the cutover window and the dunning inside it, all the way to completion.
Stripe's own migration guidance makes the point plainly: the technical rewrite is typically two to four weeks of work. The months come from data migration, parallel-running, and the absence of a dedicated owner. That owner is the product you are buying.
Qualification
The service is selective on purpose. The assessment tells you which side of the line you are on before anyone signs anything.
Mid-market and enterprise card-not-present software platforms with a meaningful stored-card or subscription book, where the move is real revenue and the risk of breaking merchants is the blocker.
Those take days, cost little, and do not need a managed campaign. The assessment will tell you which one you are.
Stored credentials that do not move cleanly put revenue at risk, and processor-published customer research suggests as many as 40% of newly signed small businesses on integrated platforms never fully enable payments. An unowned migration compounds both problems.
The Track Record
The proof pattern is consistent: the migrations that finish are the ones where a single owner carries merchant consent, verification, and cutover as one campaign instead of three departments' side projects. Every campaign we run reports weekly against the 100% line until the book is live.
One real campaign rendered as a burn-up. Waves, stalls, exception handling, and the completion date.
The migrations that finish are owned. The same discipline that produced these numbers is what runs against your book.
Get Started
Bring your current processor, the shape of your merchant book, and the destination you are considering. The first conversation tells you whether the move is ready, what it depends on, and what the assessment would need to prove. If the honest answer is "do not migrate," you want that answer before the contract is signed, not after.