Prepare for major payment failure with good fallback options

The Maatschappelijk Overleg Betalingsverkeer (MOB), with Dutch Payments Association and other participants, has issued advice for consumers and entrepreneurs on how they can prepare for payments emergencies that last for three days.

Digital fallback options for entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs who want to continue making payments with customers safely, efficiently and accessibly for as long as possible in an emergency situation can keep one or two digital fallback options in reserve. This could include a battery-powered mobile payment terminal through an alternative transaction processor and an alternative telecom provider. It could also be mobile request-to-pay via a QR code, on a smartphone or tablet.

There are half a dozen different digital fallback options in the Netherlands for retailers to choose from, something for everyone.

Partial failure of digital payments infrastructures

Most outages in the past affected one bank, one transaction processor, one telecom company, one internet provider or one area where power went out. For those kinds of partial outages, there are suitable digital fallback options for every entrepreneur. This allows them to delay the fallback to cash only until an emergency situation potentially worsens to the complete failure of all digital communications.

Total failure of power and telecoms

An emergency situation in which electricity, telephony and internet all fail completely simultaneously is rare. In that case, you will only be able to pay with cash and with so-called ‘deferred debit card payments’, on suitable battery-powered POS terminals (offline debit card payments at the checkout).

Business owners can ask their PIN service provider about the possibilities and conditions of deferred debit card payments.

Advice for consumers

For consumers, the main advice is to keep enough cash on hand per person, €70 for an adult and €30 for a child. In addition, consumers can keep several digital payment instruments:

• an additional debit card or credit card, from another bank;
• a smartphone with a working banking app, for quick account-to-account transfers to merchants and for scanning QR codes when requesting payment from merchants.

Read the full MOB advice to consumers and entrepreneurs

Read all about fallback options for entrepreneurs..