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September 2025 • Issue 25:09:01

Insider’s report

on payments

Reliability at risk:

Payments under pressure

By Patti Murphy Not so if you're moving money over non-bank networks.
Back on Aug. 1, 2025, when PayPal and Venmo both went
hen a payment network goes down, cus- down for several hours, thousands of users from across the
tomer loyalty erodes. This is not new. But globe reported problems. Downdector, a popular outage
for today's consumers, payment alternatives tracking website, showed outage reports began just before
W abound, and more often than not, they vent 9 a.m. that day for both of these popular payment apps.
their frustrations on social media platforms. (Venmo is owned by PayPal which would explain the fact
that both networks went down at the same time.)
"When consumers can't complete transactions as expected,
it impacts trust in the provider," said Tony Allen, CTO at About three hours later, both networks were operational.
Recurly, a subscription management and recurring billing But that didn't stop consumers from complaining on
platform. "They may look for another platform that can do various social media platforms. The disruption of service
the function for them." was magnified by the fact that it occurred on the first of the
month, an important time for many consumer transactions.
Ditto for businesses running credit/debit card transactions
through processors and/or gateways. We've all heard Since I am the self-proclaimed payments maven of the
accounts of these going down. fourth estate, friends and colleagues were quick to report

"We really don't want systems to go down," said Robert
Hewlett, senior managing director at Jack Henry, and
that company's payments technology maven. That's why,
he noted, Jack Henry, and other companies that support Contributed articles inside by:
financial institutions' payments operations, engage in
regular disaster recovery exercises. Allen Kopelman .....................................................................................16

"In the event there is a problem in one data center, we can Elie Y. Katz ...............................................................................................18
move to another data center without missing a beat," Hewlett Sarah Craven ..........................................................................................26
told me. He added that Jack Henry also uses a variety of
rails to move payments for FIs and their customers. "In the Melinda Roylett .....................................................................................28
event one goes down, we can use another so payments get
made on time." Tom Cook ................................................................................................30
Ken Musante ..........................................................................................32

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