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"Sainsbury's and Tesco were also faced with an IT outage over the weekend"

I know that Sainsbury's and Tesco use different payment gateways, so I think it's misleading to refer to it as "an" outage.   So was it something else, an issue with their comms provider? Or one of the acquiring banks?

It's an eye-catching headline but is it really going to translate to a dip in merchant's profit & loss statements? I am sure that customers who want to buy an item and get a decline will try a different card, or perhaps PayPal for example. Or customers would become so frustrated with a site that they go to a different merchant, which is a lost sale for the first merchant, but a win for the second; and net zero for the UK industry overall. So the call-to-action should be for merchants to ensure that their payments provider is up-to-date with the latest mandated requirements because payments is not just a commodity, it can be a differentiator in the last small but vital step of capturing an online purchase.

Interesting data but wrong conclusion on point 1 "Our data indicate that during COVID-19 people started calling more regarding issues that could have been handled online — just to make sure their problems were definitely resolved." The conclusion that companies should hire more people that their customers can talk to doesn't solve the problem, which is that customers are fed up with generic answers like "your issue has been recorded and we're doing all we can to address it". Whether that comes from a chatbot, or whether someone reads it out to me from a script over the phone, it's not going to give me much assurance. Technology needs to enable meaningful communication from real people. e.g. The CSR should tell me "on average its taking 2 to 3 days before an engineer can look into your issue". And communication channels need to be kept open, e.g. the engineer should be able to add a note to the issue which sends me an email.