Acquirer processing: How we ensure stress-free platform onboarding and migrations

Switching to a new acquiring platform shouldn’t be a headache. We understand that moving your payment operations can bring up worries about disruptions, downtime, and losing important data, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Our VP of Acquiring Product, Robin Anderson, is here to share how Tribe ensures a smooth, secure, and hassle-free experience for all our customers during the onboarding and migration process.

When your fintech or acquiring business is growing and it’s time to migrate to a new payments platform, it’s normal to feel a bit overwhelmed. Maybe your current platform feels stuck in the past, unable to generate new revenue and handle a rapidly growing product to keep up with your business or your customers’ needs. Or perhaps you’re tired of feeling like just another number to your current provider, getting charged for every little thing.

Think of it like moving to a new home – it can be stressful, but it doesn’t need to be. We’re here to walk you through the process and make it as easy as possible. By tackling these concerns together, we can get you smoothly transitioned to a better payments platform, where your business can thrive without the stress.

Fear #1: The process will be taxing, time-consuming, and hurt our revenues…

For many payments businesses looking to switch to a new platform, speed of migration might be their prime focus. But security, safety and knowledge of how to manage the migration should be their top concern. It’s vital that the safety of migration – including all business and customer data – is not compromised for the sake of speed.

Most customers looking at migrations will typically have 12 to 18 months left on their contract when they begin considering other options – and existing providers usually expect a six-month notice period. So, essentially, customers looking to switch are giving themselves a migration roadmap of nine months. 

When switching to Tribe, new customers can rest assured that we have a deep understanding of the capabilities required, and the ability to manage the process from beginning to end. This means the involvement of a company’s incumbent processor is reduced significantly, which takes a big burden off the customer’s shoulders. 

What’s more, our ability to demonstrate production stability, resilience and the capacity to take on additional transaction volumes and scaling plans is immensely valued by our customers. 

Fear #2: There are too many technical hurdles to overcome…

One of the ways that we ensure a successful migration and go-live is by giving clients access to our sandbox system before they sign with us. We’ve taken our learnings from the issuing side and applied them to our acquiring, which has traditionally been a less innovative part of the ecosystem. 

We give them this access early on, so they can be ahead of the game when a formal project starts. They can have full access to test their APIs, view the portal, test the web hooks, and they can effectively simulate a live production and build their system out accordingly. Our customers can do all of this before they even get to the implementation stage. 

We facilitate this by providing a wide range of touchpoints, including weekly calls or Slack access, so the various technical teams on both sides can talk to each other and work on interactive project plans.

We can recreate the customer’s whole environment in the sandbox before they’ve even signed with us. And our clients love it. They’ve told us that we’re providing them a fully flexible sandbox environment in ways that other providers can’t. We have a process to speed it up and offer access within 30 minutes. We can also fine-tune the sandbox for our clients’ BINs and some of the specific configurations and settings they need.

One of the things that we excel at is applying our clients’ existing business rules, data structures and merchant segmentation logic into our deployments. Our experience team will ensure that acceptance data and merchant data is structured in a way that makes sense for their existing business, allowing users to transition seamlessly to new portals and services. We will take the time to understand the workflows and accountabilities of your core teams, and we provide advice and guidance on how to get the most out of Tribe products.

Another customer benefit is the aggregation of products we can offer, all in one platform. Customers might have three or four incumbent suppliers for various products and services, but with Tribe they can consolidate that into one relationship. Risk profiles, 3D Secure, processing and fraud prevention can all come through a single integration pathway, rather than three contracts with multiple service providers. This eliminates the inconvenience and hassles of dealing with multiple people if issues arise.

Fear #3: We’ll be left to fend for ourselves during migration…

The client onboarding and migration teams at Tribe have all worked within the payments and fintech industries. They know from first-hand experience many of the questions and concerns that customers may have during the onboarding and migration processes. 

Migrations in the acquiring world are usually complicated, messy and take twice as long as expected to complete - but that doesn’t have to be the case. By taking the time to understand our clients’ acceptance ecosystem, their customer portfolio and the most common merchant/consumer touchpoints, Tribe will be able to build a plan for migration that makes a transition as seamless as possible. We will be able to advise what data inputs we will require from incumbent providers, and which we will not, prioritising areas of highest value and material risk to deliver a migration that - in many cases - merchants will not even notice.

That’s why our teams go above and beyond to implement a migration game plan and deliver clear and frequent communications across whatever channels the customer prefers, including JIRA, Slack and other touchpoints, alongside the more usual emails and phone calls.

Each customer gets a dedicated implementation manager, who is in constant communication and who organises and aligns every part of the onboarding and migration process from end to end. We know that customers dread being kept in the dark, so Tribe Payments ensures that they receive regular migration status updates to ensure a painless migration. Our experienced support staff guide customers through the entire process, every step of the way, so new customers can sit back, relax and experience a safe, secure and seamless migration.

The proof is in the happy customers

In line with our ‘customer obsession’ core value, we’ve made the onboarding and migration process as easy and pain-free as possible – and all backed up by friendly, in-depth, and ongoing client support.

Since we’re well-attuned to the needs of each of our customers, our service level agreements (SLAs) are hyper-focused on ensuring rapid responsiveness to any and all customer queries and issues. We also have capabilities for technical and commercial people on both sides of the migration to interact. We respect and respond to the different needs of those individuals; we’re attuned to how they want to communicate and what they expect in terms of speed of response.

In fact, our customer feedback shows that Tribe’s hyper-personalised support is one of the things that makes us stand out in the market. We consistently exceed customer expectations. That’s why our SLA and service ticket stats are so strong, and our customer product renewal rate is far above the industry average. 

The number of products that Tribe customers are taking is doubling; clients currently under implementation are taking an average of 5.25 products from Tribe, compared with 2.85 products from those who are already live. Tribe also scored 8.9 out of 10 in our most recent NPS survey, a fantastic gauge of our clients’ happiness, and testament to how responsive we are to service ticket and SLA times, and clients’ needs.

The key point is we’re incredibly proactive as early as possible. What customers tell us is that previous providers are nowhere near as proactive, which is one of the reasons why they come to us. We know what needs to be done way ahead of anticipated go-live dates, customers don’t have to lift a finger. We do all the heavy lifting on their behalf to ensure proactive, painless and prosperous onboardings and migrations.