What do you do when payment systems fail?

Failure of payment system could have severe impact on economic activity through affecting the smooth flow of transactions and trade in general and unable to pay for daily expenses by individual in particular. It is, therefore, critical to ensure payment systems has always alternatives and should be offered on competitive manner to avoid potential single point of failure risk. To avoid potential risk, it is always recommendable to have an alternative means of payment mechanisms including cash.

A payment system can fail in many instances. I would divide these into two: a) centralized systems (card systems or clearing for payments) b) individual operator systems e.g. payment engine of a bank or network connecting to that system. It's important to have monitoring with SLAs and processes for different levels of failures/errors in place before anything happens. Then during a failure you follow set processes in order to solve the issue. Please keep in mind that the failure might be caused by a DDoS or a larger deliberate attack against payment infrastructure. It is also paramount to have Business Continuity Plan and a designed emergency team to handle those situations.

The failure of a payment system is not a single person job, neither it is IT or technical support job. The business team who is responsible for payment should have ready plans to handle the failure of each payment system on its own, with prepared alternatives. The second parallel task is to facilitate the alternative in case it is not ready to use, otherwise just move directly to root cause identification.

Payment system failures can have real-life consequences. An example would be the inability to pay for an emergency surgery. Building redundancy into our payment systems is essential to cater for unplanned failures.

Redundant and resilient payment systems, Multiple payment channels Backup and Disaster recovery Keep clients and stakeholders informed

It's important to keep them informed about failures as soon as we can. This will prevent unnecessary disagreements with our customers, ensuring that trust and loyalty remain intact.

Based on my experience of owning payment area business continuity plans and running the emergency team for one of TOP10 banks in Europe: -customers like to know sooner than later -if you don't know the nature or extent of the failure, communicate still that you have a failure in such and such area -also a separate communication lines for the largest corporate customers are advisable.

In most cases the customers will know first. As the industry becomes more digitized and there are an increasing number of service providers discovering who is at fault may become initially difficult. One would hope the banks/financial institutions will show leadership. Each country should have payment system council that is answerable to the central bank or another government agency that can start kicking 'arse'.

Payment System participant financial institutions should get a notification to take appropriate precautions and measures and notify as well as turn on any other alternative payment options to their customers.

When we are aware of system failure, we need to find out the root cause and try to make it back to normal as soon as possible without any delay, but it is not enough. We must inform our customers, merchants, and partners about what is happening immediately, as they are affected by it. Sometimes, inexperienced system engineers try to fix it silently. No one except them is aware of it before it becomes a big issue. This is an irresponsible behavior. We all must be transparent and let everyone know what is happening and the estimation of how long it will take to fix, as it impacts all stakeholders.

From my own experience, a good fallback scenario would be to have multiple payment provider integrations for different payment methods simultaneously; Rather than channeling all payment methods traffic through one payment provider. As example, offer cards through Adyen or Stripe, and have a direct standalone integration to PayPal. In this case, if Adyen or Stripe is down, customers could still have PayPal to fallback to.

It's essential to possess not only a desirable trait but an indispensable one for the payments system. Alongside building resilience, it's equally crucial to fortify/strengthen the existing payment systems and guarantee their flawlessness. India's UPI sets a prime example, successfully handling over 9 billion transactions per month.

This is so crucial, employing multiple rail payment system , redundant payment integration and offline payment technologies like USSD could help much. From our own experience in Ethiopia, Kacha, the first private Payment Instrument Issuer has integrated with EthSwitch, the National Switch and created a direct integration with peer mobile money platform , with banks and MFIs as an alternative.

From the Merchant's POV, It’s important to ask the provider to set up what it’s known as Smart Routing. This routing will provide the most powerful intelligence to understand when a group of payments -given specific criteria on a certain situation, can be switched to a second engine. Thus, the payment requests will be saved and successfully processed with a minimum risk of rejection or poor conversion. This is not an easy process. The payment provider, through their Partnership and BizOps departments, should select the partners, and after the proper operational and pricing calibration, it should be used accordingly to the business model needs or for a specific merchant -usually for Enterprise, Strategic, PSPs, and Channels.

The architecture of a payment system has always been complex and is expensive. This is why historically banks have generally cooperated on infrastructure and competed on service. There will be with any payment system a single point of failure, somewhere. Identification of that point is the challenge all architects should focus on. Only then can it be addressed. As a business, especially payees supporting at least two payment methods is critical. Cards is obviously one but now we also have NRT payment services being introduced. This requires your customer to use mobile or Internt banking. For mobile the point of acceptance can be supported by a QR code.

Financial Institutions rely heavily on complex and interconnected IT systems to facilitate critical operations, such as transactions and managing end-user experience. With the increasing volume and complexity of transactions, traditional monitoring approaches are no longer sufficient to ensure optimal performance and mitigate risks effectively. These emerging challenges mandate the need for advanced application performance monitoring (APM) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) tools to bring intelligent automation like wide observability, early warning, resource utilization, root cause analysis, auto-remediation, and infrastructure optimization, This empowers them to conquer challenges and achieve remarkable efficiency.

Who is responsible for managing/monitoring the end to end experience if not a regulator? There are stress testing tools available. However seting up a testing environment that mirrors the life payment system/environment can be a challenge. Identification of each use case or variation of a use case is not easy.

Every party in the payment system chain must take on the responsibility to deliver an efficent and robust service. We are learning and the technology components that make up a payment system have significantly improved/developed over the last 30-40 years. They will continue to improve. Failure has an upside as it provides a learning experience but it will negatively impact the velocity of money flowing through an economy. For those that are new to using financial services, failure will dimish their trust and they will revert back to cash.

Efficient payment system will not only empower seamless flow of money, but it will contribute to the resilience of national economy. This is justified by reduction of unnecessary velocity of money, combating of financing of terrorism by employing proper AML CFT measures , reducing broad money supply ( printed money) push inflation and bring about cash lite society and pave the way to cashless payment system.

Instead of using “you” in the main title, which is too broad, having looked at the content, I would say perhaps the main title should be something like: “What should Payment System Providers (PSPs) do when Payment Systems fail?”