Traditionally, resilience in the world of payments meant having a disaster recovery plan tucked away in a drawer and a backup data center ready to go. However, with the evolution of payment methods, increased fraud, stricter regulations, and global expansion strategies, resilience now hinges on having payment systems that are flexible, adaptable, and robust while maintaining performance and compliance.
When done right, resilience can actually drive growth rather than just being a cost. It enables smoother customer experiences and quicker adoption of innovations like open banking and dynamic fraud prevention measures.
The BR-DGE playbook [PDF] outlines payments resilience as a set of capabilities that business leaders can craft and oversee. A survey of 50 decision-makers at enterprise e-commerce merchants in October 2025 revealed that resilience gaps are prevalent and closely tied to the design of payment technology stacks.
Why payments resilience is a business problem, not just an IT issue
The study affirms what many executives already suspected: payment outages occur frequently, and their consequences are significant. Over the past two years, 92% of enterprise e-commerce merchants have faced payment outages or disruptions.
Of those able to quantify the impact, half reported losses ranging from £1.1 million to £10 million, with an additional 34% reporting losses between £100,000 and £1 million. All companies with online transaction volumes exceeding £500 million reported losses in the £1.1 million to £10 million range.
Despite this, resilience is not currently a top priority for most. When asked about their main focuses for the next two years, merchants ranked customer experience (58%), cost optimization (54%), and new-market entry (40%) as the most critical, with only 28% choosing resilience.
Many organizations still view resilience as a simple redundancy question: do we have a backup provider? However, research and case studies indicate that resilience is fundamental to customer experience and expansion. When payment systems fail to evolve, enterprises struggle to enter new markets, meet regulatory demands, or maintain authorization rates as they grow.
The five building blocks of modern payments resilience
Survey data and use cases point to five key building blocks.
Redundancy
Relying on a single payment service provider (PSP) may be straightforward, but it also poses a risk. A single outage could halt all transactions, leaving customers stuck at checkout and revenue streams interrupted.
It is still common practice, with 4% of merchants using a single processor, and the majority routing most of their volume through a primary provider. Among those using multiple processors, 71% route 50–70% of their volume through their primary processor, and 27% route 71–90%.
For CIOs and CTOs, the lesson is that redundancy eliminates manual interventions during incidents, safeguards revenue, and provides visible assurance that the business can continue trading during provider issues.
Practical redundancy involves:
- Connecting at least two PSPs with tested automatic backup routing.
- Monitoring daily transaction success rates, not just during incidents.
- Conducting quarterly failover tests to confirm backup routes’ effectiveness.
Flexibility
The research indicates that complexity and rigidity are prevalent issues, with 46% of enterprise merchants supporting six to ten payment methods worldwide, and 22% supporting 11–20.
54% state that payment limitations have hindered or delayed their expansion into new markets.
Many enterprises end up with multiple PSPs, each serving different regions or methods, with distinct configurations and token stores. This fragmented setup leads to operational complexities and impacts performance.
Practical flexibility entails having a unified control layer that enables teams to activate local methods, adjust routing, and swap or add PSPs without revamping the entire stack.
Flexibility raises questions such as:
- How quickly can we introduce or retire a PSP without overhauling significant portions of our application landscape?
- Are we still reliant on manual processes to alter routing or enable new methods?
Interoperability
Interoperability involves developing platform-agnostic systems that can share data and functionalities across providers.
Tokenization serves as a prime example. While 78% of merchants utilize some form of tokenization, only 12% have fully interoperable token vaulting. Many depend on provider-specific tokens or fragmented forwarding services, limiting routing options, increasing outage risks, and complicating new provider adoptions.
Interoperability entails moving away from vendor lock-ins towards modular, API-driven components like central token repositories and fraud tools that seamlessly integrate with any PSP or acquirer stack.
Optimization
Optimization uses data to tweak routing, fine-tune fraud prevention measures, and identify issues early on. Most merchants acknowledge this as a strategic necessity, with 54% highlighting cost optimization as a crucial focus.
The playbook reveals that 64% employ rule-based routing, 62% still rely on manual optimization, and 38% utilize some form of AI or machine learning-based optimization.
Optimization hinges on having a consolidated view across PSPs, schemes, devices, and channels; the ability to experiment and adjust routing strategies in real time; analytics to distinguish genuine processor issues from configuration or user experience problems.
Future-readiness
Resilience entails preparing for future customer expectations. It involves constructing infrastructure that can assimilate new technologies and customer behaviors without necessitating a complete overhaul. The research indicates that new-market entry (40%) and customer experience (58%) are strategic priorities for high-value and mobile-first segments.
The value of payments resilience
While most merchants do not currently prioritize resilience in their payment strategies for the next two years, the paper argues that modern payments resilience empowers enterprises to:
· Mitigate the repercussions of outages and provider issues
- Quickly adapt to evolving customer preferences and regulations
- Enhance authorization rates and reduce expenses
- Accelerate expansion into new markets without necessitating extensive technological reconfigurations
Payments resilience into ROI
- Resilience should be viewed as a growth facilitator rather than a compliance burden, and a payments strategy should not equate resilience with redundancy.
- Businesses should employ more than a single PSP and associated manual workarounds in case of failures. At minimum, two processors should be utilized, with an orchestration layer in place. Additionally, failover testing should be conducted quarterly.
- Decision-makers may also consider centralizing tokenization and embracing open, modular architecture and APIs.
- The goal should be one-click, dynamic, personalized checkouts. Alternatives like open banking transfers could be offered alongside card payments, and failover experiences must be seamless for customers.
- Ensure that fraud, KYC, and compliance controls support customer convenience as well as regulatory requirements.
Approaching payments resilience in this manner enables enterprises to weather outages, venture into new markets swiftly, convert more customers, and operate more efficiently.
Every failed transaction represents a cost and potential loss of trust. The amalgamation of resilience, efficiency, and adaptability is becoming one of the most crucial tools leaders can leverage.
(Image source: “Market” by alexfiles is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
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