Payment Resilience in a Hyper-Connected World
Across Europe, digital payments enable secure, reliable, and convenient transactions that support consumers and businesses alike. With every tap of a card, every mobile payment, and every instant transfer, there is an expectation and trust that the system will work and money will move both quickly and securely.
In today’s hyper-connected world, resilience is not simply a technical consideration, it is an economic imperative. On the occasions when a payments outage occurs, the impacts can, if left unchecked, rapidly multiply and cause significant challenges for stakeholders. Businesses lose sales, account holders cannot access their funds, confidence is impacted and indeed entire supply chains can grind to a halt.
At Visa, end-to-end payments resilience is our highest priority. Every day we work to maximise the ability of our network and services to continue operating effectively in the face of any disruptions, shocks or adverse events to Visa or other parties in the value chain. We work to ensure that payments, whether domestic or cross border, e-commerce or in store, can be initiated, processed and settled securely, reliably and on time, even when the system is under stress.
Resilience as a Shared Ecosystem Challenge
I believe that the highest levels of resilience can be achieved through a co-ordinated approach embraced by all stakeholders from governments and regulators to technology providers, banks, issuers, acquirers, merchants, and consumers. All these parties can make an important contribution to ensuring that we maintain payments networks with the highest levels of resilience under even the most challenging scenarios.
This shared responsibility extends beyond merely preventing outages. It's about creating systems that can adapt, reroute, and recover quickly when disruptions occur. It's about ensuring that when one pathway fails, alternatives are immediately available and deployed. It's about maintaining the trust that underpins our entire digital economy.
The Path Forward: Five Pillars of Resilience
Recent analysis commissioned by Visa, and undertaken by Oliver Wyman, has identified five critical areas providing opportunities for Europe to strengthen its payment resilience:
Assess and adopt resilience-enhancing solutions: Payments firms should assess, and consider adopting, available products and services which can support functionality during disruptions.
Identify concentration risks: Understand and address potential single points of failure across the payments ecosystem.
Assess regulatory effectiveness: Regularly review frameworks to ensure they address evolving threats.
Focus on essential goods and services providers: Assess the resilience and access to essential goods and services – particularly important in the event of prolonged disruption.
Recognise the foundational role of services across industries: Strengthen resilience across industries that support payments continuity.
Visa's Deep Commitment to European Resilience
At Visa, resilience isn't an afterthought, it's our foundational starting point and embedded in everything we do. Every transaction represents a moment of truth, and at Visa that test is taken more than 800 million times a day.
We recently made five specific pledges to Europe including our commitment to strengthen Network Resilience with local infrastructure and comprehensive backup options.
Our multi-layered approach combines prevention, detection, response, and recovery, backed by more than $11 billion in investment over the past five years. Through VisaNet, we operate one of the world's most sophisticated payment networks, with multiple independent data centres, including one in Europe, ensuring no single point of failure. This infrastructure delivers 99.999% core processing quality, with processing times measured in milliseconds.
Visa’s systems are designed with resilience as a core underlying principle. Recently, when a major bank in one of Europe's largest economies experienced a significant outage, consumers and businesses were able to continue making and receiving payments thanks to Visa's stand-in issuer processing capability until the bank was back online.
In addition to providing stand-in processing services, we have worked with issuers, acquirers and regulators to build other capabilities, including enabling offline payment capabilities, allowing transactions in Europe to be completed without network access in emergencies, complete with safeguards and clear liability rules. These initiatives ensure payments can continue when the system is facing disruption or severe levels of stress.
Looking Towards the Future
The payments landscape will continue to evolve, shaped by new technologies, changing customer expectations, and emerging risks we haven't yet imagined. Building resilience isn't a one-time project, it's an ongoing process that must adapt and evolve with the market.
The opportunity for Europe is enormous. By investing in redundancy, security, and collaboration today, we can create a payments ecosystem that is not just efficient and innovative, but truly resilient. This means ensuring that payments continue to power Europe's economy no matter what challenges may emerge.