If your business already accepts card payments then your existing Payment Service Provider (PSP) will probably be storing the card details of your customers in their card vault. ProcessOut requires you to store the card details in its own highly secure vault so we can pass them to the best available PSP during a transaction. (See this page to learn more about how ProcessOut works.)

ProcessOut can contact your existing PSP to request access to the card details they are currently storing for you. We can then arrange to transfer those details securely into our vault. When the transfer is complete, you can start using ProcessOut to handle payments using these cards.

Note that the card details are the only data we can transfer from your existing PSP. You will need to make your own arrangements to transfer other data objects that represent customers, plans, etc.

The migration process

ProcessOut handles most of the details of migration for you but you must adapt the way you handle payments in your own code along the way. The process follows a number of steps that are described below:

1. Integrate ProcessOut into your app
   Before migrating any card details, you must first adapt your client and server code to work with the ProcessOut API. (Browse our documentation using the sidebar to the left for full details of how to do this.)
   Until the migration is complete, your code must handle new customers with ProcessOut while continuing to handle existing customers with your old PSP. It is very important that you avoid adding any new customers to the old PSP while the migration is in progress, otherwise their details could be lost.
2. Introduce your ProcessOut Account Manager to your old PSP
   When your app is ready for migration, you can introduce your ProcessOut account manager to the account manager of your old PSP. We will arrange for them to export the card data, which we will later import into our vault. This is a manual step that could take a few days or a few weeks, depending on your PSP.
   Typically, we give the old PSPs access to a public key that they use to encrypt the exported card data. They then upload the data to a secure server and grant us access. Finally, we transfer the data to our own servers and decrypt it.
3. Let ProcessOut import the card data
   We import the card data into into our vault as soon as it is available. The card ID values in the data will initially be in whatever format the old PSP was using and this will generally not be the same as the format that ProcessOut uses.
   For your convenience, we will alias the old format with our own prefix during the import. For example, if the old PSP used a card ID of 12345 then this card will receive a new ID of card_psp-name_12345 in our vault. This simple prefixing makes it easy for you to use the new card IDs without any complicated mapping between the ID formats.
4. Remove references to your old PSP
   When the migration is complete, all cards will be available to ProcessOut, so you can remove any code that deals with your old PSP without any interruption to service. Note that you can configure ProcessOut with routing rules that send any given type of transaction to a specific PSP. Using these rules, you can continue to select the old PSP exclusively whenever you find it useful to do so.