Many present-day businesses are still using legacy systems to handle payments. Often these legacy systems are incapable of meeting the requirements of modern merchant services industry. Although the management of a company might realize the necessity of replacing the legacy system with a newer solution, capable of performing existing and new tasks more effectively, it is often unclear to the managers, how to organize the transition process.
True, legacy system replacement is a challenging task, but it can be accomplished successfully, if a clear transition strategy is in place. This strategy must include several crucial phases, such as: preparation of PCI compliant environment; inventory and optimization of integrations with payment processing partners; analysis and optimization of front-end systems, connected to the legacy platform; analysis of business processes (settlement, reporting, reconciliation, funding, merchant on-boarding, etc.); devising of data migration mechanisms. The data, which has to be migrated, includes merchant data, recurring billing plans, tokenization data, and, sometimes, transaction data.
In other words, the company, which comes through legacy system modernization process, must decide, how to migrate the integrations with payment processors and front-end systems, business logic, and data to the new system.
More information on legacy system replacement strategy can be found in the respective article on Paylosophy.
