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Avoiding a Crash While Helping Customers Safely Spend Cash

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Samuel Crompton

Associate Partner (Banking, Resilience and AI)

IBM

With the busiest retail event of the year now behind us, those responsible for the technology services that underpin our ability to make purchases on Black Friday are likely now breathing a sigh of relief.

Headlines at a glance suggest that 2024 has been kinder to retailers’ digital infrastructure than in previous years, with fewer outages reported despite an exceptionally busy week of online sales, that coincided with payday.

But behind the scenes, what does it take for banks to navigate the balance of delivering seamless shopping experiences while maximizing revenue, in one of the most high-pressure retail weeks of the year?

Having spent much of 2024 helping clients prepare for the PRA/FCA Operational Resilience deadline, here’s a few insights on how payments providers can successfully navigate high-volume sales periods, and the crucial role of technology, strategic planning and thorough preparation in driving success.

Expect the unexpected – You can never be too prepared. Game days, scenario testing, chaos engineering – these are all approaches that help teams to think outside of the box and prepare for crisis.

Monitor end to end services - Monitor and optimise your services end to end, rather than on a component-by-component basis. Ensuring payments processes can handle a significant increase in transaction volumes without downtime or delays. In the event of the unexpected, optimised monitoring can ensure the ability of infrastructure to auto-scale based on varied and unpredictable demand.

Focus on security – Whilst many will focus on IT capacity, its equally important to be aware of the likelihood of ‘bad-actors’ utilising the excitement of peak periods to gain access to customer data. Ensuring you implement multi-factor authentication and other robust measures to protect customer accounts is part of the solution, but customer education can be equally as important.

Transparent communications – If the above fails, and there is an outage, it is essential to have well-rehearsed, pre-approved communications. Be sure to communicate clearly to customers and have a plan to respond to any eventuality.

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Samuel Crompton

Associate Partner (Banking, Resilience and AI)

IBM

Member since

17 Jul 2019

Location

London

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Samuel Crompton Associate Partner (Banking, Resilience and AI) at IBM