Vault portability is the ability to use stored payment method tokens across multiple payment providers and, where necessary, migrate tokenized payment data from one vault provider to another without requiring customers to re-enter their payment details. It is the practical expression of Gateway Agnosticism applied to stored payment data.
The absence of vault portability is one of the most consequential forms of payment infrastructure lock-in. When a merchant stores customer payment methods in a gateway-specific vault, those tokens are proprietary to that gateway. They cannot be used to process transactions through any other provider. If the merchant wants to add a second gateway for routing or failover purposes, the stored credentials cannot be shared, the merchant must either route all affected customers back through the original gateway (negating the purpose of adding a second) or ask customers to re-enter their cards (which most will not do, resulting in lost subscription relationships or abandoned saved payment methods).
Vault portability resolves this problem at the architectural level. Spreedly's universal vault stores payment tokens that are provider-agnostic, the same token can be used to process a transaction through any of the 120+ gateways in the Spreedly ecosystem. The customer's payment method is stored once and usable everywhere. This is what makes true Dynamic Routing possible: the routing layer can direct a transaction to any gateway without the vault constraining which gateway can receive it.
For merchants migrating to Spreedly from a gateway-specific vault, Spreedly supports import of existing payment credentials, bringing stored tokens into the universal vault so that existing customer payment methods remain active without any customer action required.
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