Will customers notice the move?

No. The number, the display name and the tick are the same; their chat with you continues in the same thread on their phone. What they cannot see is your side of the history, which is why the old conversations should be exported and attached to the contacts before the switch.

Can we run two providers on one number during the transition?

No — a number is registered to exactly one WABA at a time, and registering it on the new one deactivates the old. What you can do is keep the old provider's account open, read-only, for the history, while the number lives on the new one. That is also the reason to export before, not after.

How to move a WhatsApp Business API number from one provider to another without losing it

A WhatsApp number belongs to your business, not to the provider that registered it, and Meta supports moving it. What most businesses learn during the move is which things they thought were theirs — the templates, the history — actually lived with the provider.

The Zanii platform team · 14/09/2026 · 7 min read

What moves and what does not

The number moves, with its display name, its quality rating and its messaging tier — a number at the 100,000-recipient tier arrives at the new provider at that tier. The Official Business Account tick moves with it. The Meta Business Account and the business verification are yours already and are untouched. What does not move: templates, which are attached to the WhatsApp Business Account on the old provider's side and must be recreated and re-approved; conversation history, which was in the old provider's database; and any phone number that was registered on the old provider's own WABA rather than yours — the case with several "free" BSP offers, and the case that makes migration a negotiation.

The order of operations

Export the templates from the old provider — name, language, category, body, buttons — and recreate them on the new one before the move. Approval takes hours to days, and you want them approved before the number arrives, not after.
Export the contacts and the consent records. The opt-ins are what you cannot recreate. If the old provider cannot give you a per-contact consent export, you have learned something about the old provider.
Disable two-step verification on the number in the old provider's WhatsApp Manager, or note the PIN. The migration is blocked while it is on, and this is the step that costs the most days because nobody at the old provider is in a hurry.
Start the migration from the new provider — Embedded Signup with the existing number — and approve the request that appears in your Meta Business Manager. The number is registered on the new WABA within minutes; the old registration is deactivated at the same moment.
Send a test template within the hour and watch the webhook. Then re-enable two-step verification with a PIN the business, not the provider, holds.

The 72 hours

Inbound messages during the switch go to whichever webhook is registered at that second, and a customer who messages in the minute between deactivation and registration gets a delivery failure they never see. Choose a quiet hour. Templates approved on the new side before the move are usable immediately; templates still in review are not, and a campaign scheduled for the morning after will fail if its template was recreated the night before. And the quality rating travels — a number that arrives red stays red until it earns green, which is why nobody should migrate in the middle of a complaint spike.

What goes wrong

The number was on the provider's WABA, and the provider will not release it.: Meta's policy is that the number is the business's; escalate through Meta Business Support with the licence. In the meantime verify a second number and move customers with a utility message — it is a week of pain, not a permanent loss.
Migrating on a Thursday afternoon with templates still pending.: Approvals do not run at the weekend. Recreate templates on Sunday, migrate on Wednesday morning.
Losing the consent trail in the move.: Import the old provider's opt-in export as consent receipts on day one, dated as originally captured. A campaign before that import is a campaign to a list with no consent on record.

Common questions

Will customers notice the move?: No. The number, the display name and the tick are the same; their chat with you continues in the same thread on their phone. What they cannot see is your side of the history, which is why the old conversations should be exported and attached to the contacts before the switch.
Can we run two providers on one number during the transition?: No — a number is registered to exactly one WABA at a time, and registering it on the new one deactivates the old. What you can do is keep the old provider's account open, read-only, for the history, while the number lives on the new one. That is also the reason to export before, not after.