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Insights and Expertise

management, over-the-air updates and real-time device
• Santa Clara/San Jose, Boston and Miami record- monitoring are no longer advanced capabilities reserved
ed the largest increases in in-person Visa spend- for large enterprise operators. They are baseline require-
ing by domestic and international cardholders. ments for any self-service deployment expected to per-
— Visa form reliably under pressure.
• U.S. host cities recorded roughly 5 percent year- The broader lesson for commerce
over-year growth in credit and debit card spend-
ing during the tournament. Spending by visitors The lessons from high-volume event environments extend
from outside the host cities rose more than 17 well beyond sport. As commerce becomes increasingly
percent, demonstrating the outsized role travel- self-service, connected and unattended, resilience will
ing fans played in the commerce surrounding become every bit as important as speed, convenience and
the event. — Bank of America Institute payment choice. Whether it is a stadium, railway station,
• Kansas City led U.S. host cities with a 7 percent airport or retail environment during peak trading, the ex-
pectation is the same: payment should work, every time.
increase in card spending. Philadelphia, Los An- That expectation changes how payment infrastructure
geles, Miami and New York/New Jersey also re- should be planned and evaluated. Designing for average
corded substantial gains. Restaurants and bars transaction volumes may produce a system that performs
were among the clearest beneficiaries across host perfectly well most of the time, but the commercial conse-
markets. — Bank of America Institute quences of failure are rarely distributed evenly. They con-
• During the tournament's group stage, spending centrate in precisely the moments when merchants have
in U.S. host cities was already running 6.3 per- the greatest opportunity to sell.
cent above the comparable 2025 period, while
transaction counts were up about 4.2 percent. For operators of unattended environments, that makes
Spending by local residents rose more modestly, peak performance a business issue as much as a technol-
reinforcing the importance of visiting fans. — ogy issue. A terminal that becomes unavailable during
Bank of America Institute the busiest 10 minutes of an event does not simply create
• Visa said card-present transactions rose as much inconvenience. It can mean abandoned purchases, longer
as 20 percent on match days in some U.S. host cit- queues elsewhere, lost revenue and customers who may
ies.Entertainment and restaurants experienced associate the frustration with the merchant rather than
the strongest growth in cross-border spending. the technology behind the transaction. Customers almost
— Visa never remember a payment that works exactly as expect-
ed, but they certainly remember one that does not. The
• Boston's bars and restaurants posted the largest most successful payment infrastructure is therefore likely
increase in consumer spending among World to be the infrastructure customers barely notice: available
Cup host cities during the tournament's open- when demand surges, manageable when something goes
ing two weeks, according to Square data cited by wrong and capable of recovering without disrupting com-
FIFA. — FIFA merce.
For merchants and payments providers, those
numbers illustrate why extraordinary events offer As self-service expands into more parts of everyday life,
such revealing stress tests: commerce doesn't merely resilience will increasingly be measured not by whether
increase—it becomes concentrated into particular systems can avoid every problem, but by how well they
cities, venues, merchant categories and, ultimately, absorb pressure and continue operating when conditions
very short periods when payment infrastructure has are least forgiving. Building for those moments rather
little room for failure. than for an average day is what will make the next genera-
tion of self-service commerce dependable at scale.

Designing for the peak, not the average Jean-Philippe Niedergang is acting group CEO and EMEA-Pacific-LATAM
CEO at Castles Technology, a global provider of payment acceptance
Too often, payment infrastructure is evaluated against solutions, including Android-based payment terminals and services. He
average trading conditions. In reality, the true measure has more than 30 years of leadership experience in payments, IT and
of any payment deployment is how it performs during telecommunications, including more than 20 years in the payments
its busiest few minutes. Can operators monitor an entire industry. Before joining Castles Technology, he held senior positions
fleet of devices in real time? Can software updates be de- at Verifone, Atos Origin and American Express. His experience includes
ployed remotely when required? Can terminals continue managing international teams and multimillion-euro businesses, devel-
processing transactions reliably as volumes surge? Most oping payment strategies, overseeing mergers and acquisitions and
importantly, can issues be identified and resolved before leading business restructurings. At Castles Technology, he focuses on
customers even realize there is a problem? strategic growth, global expansion and operational performance across
multiple regions. Learn more about the company at castlestech.com.
These are increasingly the questions that separate resilient Contact Niedergang via LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jean-philippe-
payment infrastructure from systems that perform well niedergang-51a442.
only under normal operating conditions. Remote fleet
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