Migration

Migrations of some sort are a fact of life for most organisations. Ideally avoided but rarely avoidable, these can be high-risk resource-hungry projects, inevitably being more complicated than first anticipated. In the Payments industry, where growth is significant and competition is rife, there’s a constant stream of new market entrants looking to harness an opportunity, and similar there are those organisations that can no longer, or choose not to, compete. Change is both forced and welcomed, bringing opportunity through preferential commercials, new features, and a host of other benefits.

But migrations do come at a cost, and costs can spiral if not carefully managed. Taking on something new, an integration, is in itself a less risky venture than a migration. Theres nothing there before, so nothing to leave and nothing to break. Migrations do not have that luxury, and a key part of any migration project is identifying and mitigating risks.

How can we help?

We have been through migrations a plenty of times, of various shapes and sizes, with varying degrees of engagement and support, and across a number of different areas such as products, services, suppliers, and technology / hosted infrastructure / cloud. Every migration is different to a point, but the approach to take has an element of repeatability to it, so experience really does count.

We’re comfortable operating in an advisory role, providing steering and governance, and equally so getting deeply involved with the risk management, planning and implementation process. We’ve led migrations ranging from relatively simple ticketing systems through to complex payment scheme migrations with large card portfolios. We can particularly add value with:

  • Overall strategy

  • Cost-modelling, budgeting, budget control

  • Resourcing

  • Risk identification, qualification, mitigation, management

  • Impact assessment

  • Planning, dependencies, constraints

  • Delivery, project support

  • Contingency and fallback planning

  • New operational processes and the migration path

Please get in touch if you would like to learn more, or to find out how we can help you.

A sample of our Migration projects

Payment Scheme Migration

Directed a Programme Manager through the process of migrating their entire and sizeable Prepaid card portfolio between two of the world’s largest payment schemes. The project was complicated by factors such as overseas issuance and a mix of open and restricted loop programmes, with scheme-specific IDs assigned to retailers. The project required a close engagement with the Issuer, Processor and Card Manufacturer, significant product development, and due to a hard deadline required very careful planning & risk management, with very tight control. Whilst being deeply involved in the project end-to-end, twenty8k also maintained a steering, governance and oversight role, and found a path to avoid bulk card re-issuance, to retain existing PINs, to avoid financial exposure due to variances in the clearing cycles, and to not disrupt disputes and chargebacks.

 

Infrastructure Hosting Migration

Full feasibility study, recommended approaches, partner selection, impact assessment and cost-forecast for a Processor to migrate their operation from physical data centres into the cloud. Scope included approaches to project delivery, resourcing, phasing, timeframes, schedules, dependencies, risk identification and mitigation. A major undertaking and a ground-breaking venture for an Issuer Processor, where apart from just SaaS/PaaS/IaaS considerations, there were dependencies on proprietary hardware, software re-architecture, migration to cloud-friendly databases, and hybrid hosting options.

Programme Manager Migration

Helping an organisation migrate from using a 3rd party Programme Manager to operating as a PM in their own right. Detailed end-to-end involvement, with support for product build and direct integration with 3rd party service providers.