Executives from two Fintech companies believe this week’s system outages could hurt SMEs the most and highlight the need for additional resiliency in an increasingly connected world.
The past seven days began with an outage at CHAPS. While it was temporary, it significantly affected European payment flows. That was followed by a cybersecurity issue at Crowdstrike that slammed technology systems, including finance and travel.
Scott Dawson is the head of sales and strategic partnerships at DECTA, a firm providing end-to-end payment infrastructure, from acquiring to issuing and processing, along with bespoke-as-standard solutions to make payments accessible to everyone.
“The news agenda has been dominated by systems and payments outages, affecting customers on the high street, at the airport, at their GPs, and nearly everywhere else that involves an IT infrastructure,” Dawson began. “It has been announced in some quarters that the problems are stemming from a technical problem with the cloud cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, and underlines just how interconnected the world’s IT systems are. As well as how a problem with one system can have knock-on effects that can do everything from grounding flights to stopping payments.”
While the issue did not emanate from the payments industry, Dawson believes it is disproportionately affected. There is also a significant knock-on effect.
“Given the severe consequences of businesses being unable to accept payments, even for a short period, the need for the industry to provide reliable services that can withstand adverse circumstances continues to be of the utmost importance.”
“Resilience is going to be a key issue going forward as systems become more complex, and companies like DECTA, who are taking a long view, are going to be vital for preventing problems like this from being a common issue.”
Cashflows CEO Hannah Fitzsimons said this week’s events highlight the fragility of the systems society relies on to function properly. Cashflows provide a safe, secure ecosystem for processing payments across Europe.
“The news is dominated by systems outages affecting nearly every corner of society. Events like this show how fragile the IT infrastructure that we rely upon really is,” Fitzsimons said. “Crowdstrike is a widely-used security system, found in almost every type of digital service, and although this problem is only affecting Windows-based hosts, it is still a major problem.”
“Although there is already a lot of press about major companies like airlines and banks, it will have arguably a more damaging effect on SMEs, who will be severely affected by losing a day or more of revenue. Others might not be able to make time-sensitive payments or accept subscriptions from customers.”
Fitzsimons said the first priority is determining the extent of the problems. Once normalcy is restored, smart companies will focus on how to prevent this from happening again.
“When we, as an industry, are done cleaning up this mess, it will be time for SMEs to look at their payment systems to make them resilient to major IT outages such as this,” she added. “They will also need to see if they have ready access to funds to make it through difficult times.”
