Key takeaways
- Establish which system is authoritative for each record before moving anything; disagreements usually predate the migration.
- Validate in parallel against real data — reconciliation is the only defensible basis for a cutover decision.
- Define rollback criteria in advance, while nobody is under pressure.
The sequence
- 01
Inventory everything
Every system holding customer, account, order, agreement, support or payout data — including spreadsheets and inboxes, which are almost always load-bearing in practice.
- 02
Establish canonical ownership
For each field, decide which current system is authoritative. Where two disagree today, resolve it now rather than importing the ambiguity.
- 03
Map to the target model
Define how each record lands in the new platform, including what has no equivalent and must be rebuilt, replaced or explicitly retired.
- 04
Validate in parallel
Run both platforms against real data and reconcile balances, evaluation states, drawdown positions and payout eligibility. Investigate every discrepancy rather than tolerating a threshold.
- 05
Plan cutover and rollback
Sequence, freeze window, decision owner, communications, and the specific conditions that trigger rollback — written down before the day.
- 06
Reconcile after launch
Re-verify state post-cutover and keep the comparison available while confidence is established. Do not decommission the old system on day one.
What goes wrong
Derived state is the usual culprit. Evaluation progress and drawdown position are often not stored anywhere — they are recomputed on demand from trading history. Recompute them on a different platform, with different rounding or a different definition of a trading day, and you get different answers for accounts that are mid-evaluation.
The second is identity. Firms accumulate duplicate customers over years, and a migration is the moment that becomes visible. Decide deliberately how to merge, and retain the historical aliases.
The third is trader trust. A migration is felt by traders whether or not you announce it. Communicating a freeze window in advance costs far less than explaining an unexplained outage afterwards.
Buyer checklist
- Authoritative source named for every record type
- Derived state identified and its recomputation validated against historical figures traders were shown
- Duplicate customer identities resolved with aliases retained
- Parallel reconciliation complete, with every discrepancy explained
- Rollback criteria and decision owner agreed in writing before cutover
- Trader communication scheduled ahead of the freeze window