Why payment diversification is becoming a merchant risk priority

Payment leaders spend significant time on fraud, conversion and cost optimisation. However, few plan explicitly for what happens when their primary payment rails go down. That gap is what deserves more attention.

England were 45 minutes into their World Cup group game against Ghana when tills went quiet across the country. A power outage at one of the UK's largest payment processors knocked out transaction authorisations across multiple platforms it runs. Pubs and venues packed for the match found their terminals frozen mid-round, so customers were queued at cash machines instead of the bar.

One small venue stood out. Heaton Sports and Cricket Club told customers they could pay by bank transfer instead. While larger operators had to turn people away, the cricket club was able to continue selling pints despite the outage on the card payment network.

The lesson here is not about any specific payment method. It’s about having a route to get paid that does not share a point of failure with your primary option.

Here is why every payment leader should treat diversification as a risk priority:

Card rails underpin more of your checkout than you realise

The payment options sitting on most checkouts look diverse:

• Apple Pay
• Google Pay
• PayPal
• Buy Now Pay Later

But beneath the surface, most share a common dependency where card rails are the common denominator across all of them. When card infrastructure experiences a failure, those methods go down with it, regardless of how they appear to the consumer.

A business offering five payment options at checkout may, in practice, have one point of failure. True diversification requires at least one payment method running on genuinely separate infrastructure, not a different interface built on the same underlying rails.

Most merchants have already experienced this problem

Payment outages are not a theoretical risk. Most merchants have already experienced disruption to card payment collection, and many have come to accept it as normal rather than something to actively plan against.

The CrowdStrike outage demonstrated the pattern clearly. While many merchants were unable to process payments, others saw a spike in account-to-account payment usage as customers actively looked for a working alternative. The difference in outcome came down to a single variable: whether or not a second payment route that worked existed.

The cost of a failed payment goes far beyond the lost transaction

When payments fail at peak moments (like the half-time rush of a World Cup match, a high-traffic sale period, or a flash promotion), businesses lose more than the immediate revenue. A failed payment at the wrong moment can end a customer relationship entirely.

Peak trading periods compound this. Traffic surges, transaction volumes spike and customers are making back-to-back purchase decisions, comparing brands in real time. A checkout that fails during that window does not just lose a sale. It damages a relationship at exactly the moment when competition for that customer is most intense, and when recovering their trust is hardest.

Running on different rails means genuinely different failure modes

Over the past decade, as contactless adoption grew, most businesses became card-only in practice without making an active decision to do so. Contactless now accounts for the vast majority of UK debit card transactions, and fewer customers carry cash as an informal backup. The resilience that cash once provided has quietly eroded.

For payment leaders, A2A differs from card infrastructure in two important ways:

• Separate rails: A2A payments move money directly between bank accounts via the UK's Faster Payments system, without touching card networks or processors. A card outage does not affect them.
• Different fraud architecture: every A2A transaction is authenticated directly in the consumer's banking app using biometrics. There are no transferable credentials to intercept or reuse, removing a vulnerability that is structural to card-not-present payments.

Introducing a payment method that runs on entirely separate infrastructure is the only way to rebuild resilience at scale. For payment leaders managing fraud exposure across a mixed stack, the architectural difference is more consequential than most tooling decisions made on top of card infrastructure.

The regulatory direction is already clear

The UK Government's 2024 National Payments Vision has explicitly cited payment system resilience as a rationale for developing A2A payments as a consumer-facing alternative to cards. The UK Payments Initiative (UKPI), which followed from that policy, is actively working to make A2A payments accessible across a broader range of merchant and consumer contexts, both online and in-store.

The Bank of England is separately working to upgrade the Faster Payments infrastructure that A2A payments run on. Merchants who evaluate diversification now are positioning ahead of a structural shift already in motion, rather than reacting to it after the fact.

Building a resilient payment stack

Diversification does not mean replacing cards. It means not having a single point of failure when peak trading moments arrive.

The cricket club that kept serving pints during the World Cup outage weren’t running sophisticated technology, it just had an alternative. For payment leaders, that is the whole argument, and the majority of merchants have already encountered the moment that makes it.

About TrueLayer

At TrueLayer, we partner with merchants to help them build these fraud-proof checkout solutions through open banking technology. By combining scalability, security and simplicity, merchants can prepare their checkout not just for the next Black Friday, but for the future of ecommerce checkout itself.

TrueLayer is Europe’s fastest growing payments network. We power smarter, safer and faster online payments by combining real-time bank payments with financial and identity data. Businesses use our products to onboard new users, accept money and make payouts in seconds, and at scale. We’re on a mission to change the way the world pays and won’t stop until we’ve unlocked the full potential of payments.