Seamless payment migrations with Card Account Updater

Card Account Updater (CAU) is best known in subscription billing, where it reduces failed payments by automatically updating expired or replaced card numbers.

But CAU is also a powerful tool for accelerating merchant migrations and minimizing payment disruptions during a migration.

When a software platform migrates merchants to a new payment provider, success doesn’t just mean onboarding merchants to the new payment provider. It’s also about continuity of payments. In a well-executed migration, merchants barely notice the change because deposits just keep showing up in their bank account. This is especially important when merchants rely on recurring payments.

The hidden cost of outdated payment methods

After switching from their original payment processor to a newer embedded payments provider, a software company noticed an unexpectedly high decline rate. The payment provider didn’t offer any suggestions, so merchants had to reach out to every customer whose card was declined to request updated payment details.

Not a great start to a new payment processing relationship.

Upon further examination, the platform found that most declines were due to expired or invalid card numbers. These are exactly the type of declines that CAU can prevent before they happen.

How Card Account Updater enables seamless migrations

In a recent migration of more than a million payment tokens, Rainforest leveraged CAU to proactively reduce decline rates.

We ran CAU on 1.2M tokens and 60,000 (5%) were updated. 

Those 60,000 cards would have been declined and declined again on retry. Then merchants would’ve had to chase down their end customers for updated card numbers.

Instead, CAU refreshed the card numbers behind the scenes. This means no disruption to payments and no manual work for merchants – demonstrating that the payments product is reliable and trustworthy.

When used strategically, CAU can turn a painful payments migration into a success story – reinforcing to merchants that they made the right choice.

Learn more and implement Card Account Updater

CAU is available to all Rainforest platform clients. Learn more:

• Card account updater → https://docs.rainforestpay.com/docs/card-account-updater
• Enable card account updater →  https://docs.rainforestpay.com/docs/enable-card-account-updater 
• Request a demo → https://www.rainforestpay.com/start-now