This page explains what is involved in moving your clients' saved bank accounts and cards from a previous payment processor into Aiwyn, and what your firm has to decide and prepare, for firms in implementation or completing a merger or acquisition.
What a migration is and is not
Your firm can migrate stored payment methods — ACH bank accounts and credit cards — from a legacy payment processor to Aiwyn. Because this involves sensitive financial data, every migration follows a PCI-compliant, encrypted process that meets Nacha and card network compliance requirements.
Full card or bank details are never shared with your firm or with Aiwyn staff. The stated goal is that client data stays protected, the migration stays compliant, and clients experience little to no disruption.
You do not run the migration yourself. Your Customer Success Manager or Implementation Manager raises a Data Migration Request on your behalf. Your part is to supply the information they need, make two decisions, and handle your own client communication.
The transfer method depends on the payment type. For credit-card transfers, an Implementation Specialist submits a data transfer request to Stripe and connects Stripe's representative with your legacy processor's representative. They coordinate the secure transfer, and your firm does not have access to the payment data. ACH saved-payment-method transfers are handled in-house by Aiwyn and do not use Stripe.
Timing and sequencing
Migrations typically take two to three weeks from initiation through final import and validation.
There is a sequencing constraint that determines when in your implementation this can happen. Credit-card methods are imported into Stripe, Aiwyn's payment processor; ACH saved-payment-method transfers are handled in-house. In both cases, each method must be mapped to an existing client record in Aiwyn. The migration can be initiated before implementation is complete, but payment methods cannot be mapped until the corresponding client records exist in Aiwyn and are up to date.
This applies both to new Aiwyn implementations and to mergers and acquisitions, where an acquired firm's client records must be migrated into Aiwyn before its stored payment methods can land anywhere.
After import, Aiwyn engineers assign payment methods to clients using available identifiers, such as client ID, email address, or other information on hand. There is no formal firm sign-off before the methods go live, but your firm can review whether the assignments look accurate and help identify missing methods. If records fail to migrate or cannot be mapped, Aiwyn engineering provides a report with counts of successful and failed records and the reasons for failures.
What can and cannot move
This effort covers saved payment methods, which may include:
- ACH bank accounts, used for one-time payments or recurring debits
- Credit cards stored on file
Apple Pay and Google Pay wallet tokens cannot be migrated between processors and are not included. Clients using those will need to re-add a payment method.
Recurring payment schedules and plans are not part of the saved-payment-method transfer. Aiwyn can generate a separate in-house file based on saved payment schedules and import that separately.
To date, VersaPay is the only legacy processor from which Aiwyn has migrated both ACH and credit-card saved payment methods through Stripe. Current ACH saved-payment-method transfers are handled in-house. Ask your CSM or Implementation Manager whether your processor's setup is supported.
Steps: prepare your migration request
Your CSM or Implementation Manager submits the request. Before they can, gather the following.
- Nominate a primary firm contact. This person must be able to contact your existing payment processor to request the export file, and to help Aiwyn with technical questions during the migration.
- Confirm which payment method types you are migrating: ACH bank accounts, credit cards, or both.
- Estimate volume — the approximate number of ACH accounts and the approximate number of stored cards.
- Identify your current payment processor.
- Set a target go-live date.
- Decide whether to enable Card Account Updater, if you are migrating stored cards. See below.
- Instruct your legacy processor to exclude client email addresses from the export file. See below.
Two decisions that are easy to get wrong
Exclude client email addresses from the export file
If client email addresses are included in the file sent to Stripe, Stripe has confirmed it will notify those clients that their payment method has been migrated. Aiwyn's process excludes email addresses from the file sent to Stripe to prevent those automatic notifications and let your firm control the timing and wording of client communications.
Ask your legacy processor to exclude email addresses while including other identifiers, such as client numbers or customer reference IDs, that Aiwyn can use to map payment methods to client records.
Card Account Updater
If you are migrating stored credit cards, your firm must decide whether to enable Aiwyn and Stripe's Card Account Updater service.
Stripe charges $0.50 per card update. Additional Aiwyn fees may apply. This workflow has not yet been run, so the total cost and invoice treatment—including whether the charge appears on the Ordway invoice—are not confirmed. Ask your CSM or Implementation Manager for current pricing before deciding.
Your CSM or Implementation Manager confirms this decision before submitting the migration request.
What happens to ACH accounts on arrival
Nacha's WEB Debit Account Validation Rule requires validation of bank accounts used for online ACH debits. Every imported ACH bank account therefore goes through a required, one-time validation step, performed in the background. No action is required from clients and no disruption occurs.
This matters mainly because it is the thing you tell clients about — it is the one visible-in-principle change to accounts they never touched.
Client communication is yours
Your firm owns planned client-facing communication. If email addresses are included in a file sent to Stripe, Stripe has confirmed that it will notify the affected clients; Aiwyn's process excludes email addresses from that file so your firm can control its own communication.
The recommended message to clients is that you are upgrading your payment technology to Aiwyn, powered by Stripe; that saved payment methods may be securely transferred; that ACH accounts will go through a required one-time validation step; and that no action is required and payments will not be disrupted.
Clients who use ACH debit blocks or ACH Positive Pay need to authorize two payee IDs with their bank — 4270465600 and 1800948598, both Stripe Payments Company — to prevent declined debits after migration. This is the one item where client inaction produces a failure, so it is worth calling out separately rather than burying it in a general announcement.
Adapt the existing “ACH blocks: Sample email template for alerting clients” for this communication rather than maintaining a separate duplicate email.
Related
- Payments & Collections Implementation Overview
- User Testing
- How payouts work
- Accepted payment methods
- ACH blocks: Sample email template for alerting clients