A Road to Resilient Payments

Learning from Ukraine.

Dateline: Woking, 18th June 2025.

The economist John Kay once wrote that very little that happens in the finance sector has a genuine need for constant activity. If the stock market halts for a couple of days, so what? Only the most boring part of the financial system (to other people, not to me), which is payments, is "an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends”.

He is right, of course. When payments go down, people notice.

Research conducted by FreedomPay, Dynatrace and Retail Economics in the UK found that retail and hospitality businesses are losing £1.6billion a year to payment system outages. These disruptions, which can last an average of 84 minutes, far exceed what most consumers are willing to tolerate, putting businesses at risk of lost revenue and reputational harm. What’s more, they are not one-off events but recurring challenges, with British businesses experiencing an average of more than five major outages each year (two-thirds of which occur during peak trading periods, naturally amplifying their impact). The study also found that one in five retail and hospitality businesses do not have a backup payment system in place, so with fewer than one third of consumers regularly carrying cash—and the average amount they carry (£35) well below the typical in-store spend of £47—businesses without digital backups are particularly exposed.

So how can we make sure that payments always work?

What with recent geopolitical shifts, many people are beginning to think again about how the continuous functioning of payments infrastructure can be supported at manageable cost and so are looking at ways to add resilience to the systems on which the economy is wholly dependent. Sweden and Norway, for example, are rethinking their progress towards cashlessness because of their fears of Russian aggression. They are looking at how to ensure that cash remains in circulation and are telling their citizens to keep cash at home in case of emergencies.

But is this the best strategy?