Payments resilience playbook: building future-ready systems

Resilience used to mean a disaster recovery document in a drawer and a secondary data centre on standby. But new payment methods, rising fraud, tougher regulation, and global expansion plans mean that resilience now depends on payment systems that can flex, reroute, and recover without sacrificing performance or compliance.

Done well, resilience becomes a growth lever rather than a cost. It allows smoother customer journeys and earlier access to innovations such as open banking and dynamic fraud controls.

A playbook from BR-DGE [PDF] shows payments resilience as a set of capabilities that enterprise leaders can design and govern. The company surveyed 50 decision-makers at enterprise e-commerce merchants in October 2025. The findings show that resilience gaps are common and closely linked to how payments tech stacks are designed.

Why payments resilience is a business problem, not just an IT issue

The research confirms what many leaders already suspect: outages are frequent, and the cost is significant. 92% of enterprise e-commerce merchants experienced payment outages or disruption in the past two years.

Among those able to quantify the impact, half reported losses of £1.1 million-£10 million, and a further 34% reported £100,000-£1 million. All firms with online transaction volumes of £500 million or more reported losses in the £1.1 million-£10 million range.

Yet resilience is not currently at the top of most minds. When asked for their priorities over the next two years, merchants said customer experience (58%), cost optimisation (54%), and new-market entry (40%) were the most important, and only 28% chose resilience.

Many organisations still treat resilience as a narrow redundancy question: do we have a backup provider? The research and the case studies suggest resilience underpins customer experience and expansion. When payment systems don’t adapt, enterprises struggle to launch new markets, meet regulatory expectations, or maintain authorisation rates as they scale.

The five building blocks of modern payments resilience

The survey data and use cases point to five building blocks.

Redundancy

Relying on a single payment service provider (PSP) is a simple architecture, but it is also a risk. One outage can block every transaction, leaving customers stranded at checkout and revenue paused.

The research shows that this is still common practice, with 4% of merchants using a single processor, and most others still route the majority of volume to a single primary provider.

Among multi-processor users, 71% route 50–70% of volume through their primary processor, and 27% route 71–90%.

For CIOs and CTOs, the lesson is that redundancy removes manual work from incident response, protects revenue, and gives a visible assurance that the business can keep trading when a provider has problems.

Redundancy in practice means:

• Connecting at least two PSPs, with automatic, tested backup routing.
• Monitoring transaction success rates daily, not just during incidents.
• Running quarterly failover tests to confirm that backup routes perform.

Flexibility

The research shows that complexity and rigidity are now common issues, with 46% of enterprise merchants support six to ten payment methods globally, and 22% support 11–20.

54% say payment limitations have prevented or delayed expansion into new markets.

Many enterprises end up with several PSPs, each serving different regions or methods, with separate configurations and token stores. That patchwork creates operational complexity and affects performance.

Flexibility in practice means a single control layer that lets teams switch on local methods, adjust routing, and replace or augment PSPs without redesigning the entire stack.

Flexibility prompts questions such as:

• How quickly can we add or retire a PSP without rewriting large parts of our application landscape?
• Are we still relying on manual steps to change routing or enable new methods?

Interoperability

Interoperability is about building platform-agnostic systems that can share data and function across providers.

Tokenisation is a good example. While 78% of merchants use some form of tokenisation, only 12% have fully interoperable token vaulting. Many rely on PSP-specific tokens or fragmented forwarding services. That limits routing choices, risks outages, and makes it harder to adopt new providers.

Interoperability means shifting away from vendor lock-in and towards modular, API-driven components, like central token stores and fraud tools that plug into any PSP or acquirer stacks.

Optimisation

Optimisation uses data to adjust routing, fine-tune fraud controls, and spot issues early. Most merchants already recognise this as a strategic priority, with 54% of surveyed merchants citing cost optimisation as a key focus.

The playbook states that 64% use rule-based routing, 62% still rely on manual optimisation, and 38% are using some form of AI or machine learning based optimisation.

Optimisation depends on a unified view across PSPs, schemes, devices, and channels; The ability to test and adjust routing strategies in real time; analytics to separate genuine processor issues from configuration or UX problems.

Future-readiness

Resilience is about being ready for what customers will expect next. It means building infrastructure that absorbs new technologies and customer behaviours without rewriting. The research showed new-market entry (40%) and customer experience (58%) are strategic priorities for higher-value and mobile-first segments.

The value of payments resilience

When asked what drives payment strategy for the next two years, most merchants did not put resilience paramount. Yet the paper maintains that modern payments resilience allows enterprises to:

Mitigate the impact of outages and provider issues

• Adapt quickly to changing customer preferences and regulations
• Improve authorisation rates and reduce costs
• Expand into new markets faster, without rebuilding tech.

Payments resilience into ROI

1. Resilience should be treated as a growth enabler, not a compliance overhead, and a payments strategy should not equate resilience with redundancy.
2. Companies should use more than a single PSP and associated manual workarounds in the event of failure. Two processors should be used, at least, and there should be an orchestration layer. Finally failover should be tested every quarter.
3. Decision makers may also with to centralise tokenisation, and use open, modular architecture and APIs.
4. The ideal should be one-click, dynamic, personalised checkouts. Alternative routes like open banking transfers could be offered alongside card payments, and failover experiences need to be seamless for the customer.
5. Ensure fraud, KYC, and compliance controls support customer ease as well as regulatory obligations.

Enterprises that approach payments resilience in this way survive outages, launch into markets faster, convert more customers, and run leaner operations.

Where every failed transaction represents a cost and, potentially, lost trust, the combination of resilience, efficiency, and adaptability is becoming one of the most important machines leaders can use.

(Image source: “Market” by alexfiles is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)

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