How to protect yourself from payments downtime
Jose Peral, COO at EasyPaymentGateway, discusses the importance of operators having payment back-ups
The news last month that WorldPay was knocked offline for a full two weeks, thus stalling the processing of millions of transactions worldwide, reminded us that no one is immune to technical outages.
We are, at the end of the day, utterly at the mercy of machines and no matter how much money you throw at these things, they go down. It’s a fact of life not just for the fintech and online gambling industries but also for tech giants like Apple, Sony and Google, all of which have experienced issues of late.
We can only speculate exactly what happened at Worldpay. What it highlights, however, is that if merchants are to avoid these types of situations, they need to have multiple back-up options. This will help you not only from a technical point of view, but also from a conversion point of view.
Plan B
At the end of the day, acquirers cannot process every single credit card transaction. Sometimes they can’t process a certain card, certain BIN ranges, or transactions from certain countries â and so if an acquirer rejects a transaction for any other reason than the customer doesn’t have sufficient funds, then the transaction should automatically be routed to another acquirer, without the customer even realising. It should all be done in the backend in a matter of milliseconds.
Ultimately you need to have not only alternative acquirers but alternative solutions as well, so that if a credit card transaction fails because of a technical fault, or because of a conversion fault, you’ll always be able to fall back on another solution, be it a wallet like Neteller or Skrill or a completely alternative solution like a voucher based solutions system.
I had a call this morning with a gaming merchant who’s having huge problems with his acquirer because it keeps going down and transactions keep getting declined. It seems to be a common occurrence so operators must ensure they have contingency plans in place.
Be prudent
Typically the best option is to go through a gateway, especially for young businesses, because they have all the experience, the contacts and the connections. And while everyone can experience issues; the real question is, how long does it take for a team to resolve those issues and how often do they happen?
Make sure you work with a company that has a very strong Service Level Agreement (SLA), so that if there is an issue you know they’re going to resolve it as quickly as possible. Whenever you sign up with a gateway or an acquirer or a solution, they give you an SLA, which basically tells you how quickly the company can respond to an issue.
If servers go down, for example, how quickly can they put things back up at 100% capacity? Within minutes? Hours? Days?
All companies suffer from technical issues, but make sure you work with one that can resolve issues quickly and that has as many solutions in place as possible to try to prevent these issues from occurring.