In today’s digital-first economy, the recent spate of IT outages across the UK reveals that payment disruptions have become a serious and ever-present threat to businesses.
As it stands, every transaction relies on complex, interconnected IT systems, from mobile apps to in-store tills and cloud services. When one of these fails it quickly leads to stalled payment operations, halted sales, and in the long run, eroded customer confidence.
Research from Dynatrace suggests that outages in the retail and hospitality sector, alone, could cost up to £1.6 billion in lost revenue every year.
But the impact doesn’t end there - after a single payment failure, one in three consumers lose trust in a business, compounding the long-term cost well beyond the immediate disruption.
Regional Vice President, UK&I, Dynatrace.
Given these financial and reputational risks, businesses must shift from reacting after an outage happens to preparing a proactive strategy before an outage strikes.
Modern IT environments are too complex to rely solely on human monitoring, and without real-time insight into system health, small issues can quickly escalate into major disruptions.
However, by leveraging integrated systems that combine AI-driven observability with dynamic failover capabilities, organizations gain the ability to detect, isolate and resolve problems before they impact transactions - safeguarding both revenue and reputation when it matters most.
Acceleration comes at a price
Organizations are under increasing pressure to digitize quickly and provide a frictionless customer experience. However, this accelerated innovation also increases the risk of outages like hardware failures, software bugs, cyber-attacks and basic human error. On average, UK businesses now report over five major outages per year.
The interdependence of systems means that these failures are not isolated events. One failure can knock out payment terminals, Wi-Fi, mobile ordering, cloud services and digital tills simultaneously. In high-footfall environments like hospitality and retail, this creates a disproportionate impact.
No cash, no room for error
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, ATM withdrawals have plummeted by 46% with just under a third (30%) of consumers always carrying cash. Without cash, when payment systems fail, transactions stop instantly. As it stands, one in five retail and hospitality businesses still lack a secure digital backup when systems fail, leaving them entirely exposed.
At the same time, customer expectations have never been higher. Payments are expected to be instant, invisible and fail-proof. Even a short delay creates friction; while delays under six minutes are broadly tolerated, disruptions beyond that cause a steep rise in lost sales.
In the short term, the consequence is financial with card machine failures accounting for £392 million in lost sales annually. However, the longer-term consequence is damaged loyalty. Today’s customers are impatient and payment delays are the fastest way to dampen trust.
A backup plan is not enough
Given the stakes of outages, it is essential that businesses build proactive resilience and remediation strategies. However, most businesses adopt a Frankenstein patchwork of solutions.
As it stands, just under half (48%) of retail and hospitality businesses have invested in secondary internet connections to keep POS systems online while only 43% have adopted mobile-based backup options, such as QR codes or app checkouts.
These measures show good intent but the diversity and inconsistency of approaches signal a lack of cohesive planning. Speed can have a real impact on the outcome of an outage: if payment systems are restored in under 10 minutes, businesses can avoid over 80% of the total financial impact.
Focusing solely on backups prioritizes a reactive approach that addresses the symptoms, not the cause. True resilience means preventing outages from escalating in the first place. Businesses must move beyond firefighting, towards building end-to-end resilience.
Building proactive resilience
To foster resilience, organisations need to integrate observability systems that isolate faults, maintain uptime and keep transactions flowing.
AI-powered observability platforms can monitor and mitigate issues in real time before they escalate, automatically preventing and remediating disruptions.
As well as revealing the source of any IT outage, these insights illustrate their impact so IT leaders have the information the C-Suite needs to keep key stakeholders informed on their response effort.
It’s not enough to know that an application was offline for a given length of time, business leaders need to understand the impact on the outcomes they are measured against, such as the number of customers impacted, or the amount of revenue lost.
Payment resilience is a business imperative
In today’s fiercely competitive market, frictionless payment experiences are essential. As IT outages become increasingly frequent and disruptive, retail and hospitality businesses must prioritize payment resilience.
Every organization should identify potential incidents that could affect their services and ensure rapid response capabilities.
While the financial cost of downtime is substantial, the longer-term impact on customer trust and brand loyalty can be even more damaging.
Companies that adopt a proactive, AI-driven strategy, offering complete system visibility, secure backups and automated fault isolation, can not only reduce revenue losses but also safeguard customer trust when it matters most.
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