The Green Sheet Online Edition
May 26, 2025 • 25:05:02
Staying resilient in an era of climate disruption
Weather is no longer predictable. Wildfires erupt in places they didn’t before. Torrential rains overwhelm drainage systems. Hurricanes strengthen faster and strike outside the traditional season. For those of us in payments, these shifts are more than headlines—they’re real, operational threats to our businesses and those of our merchant clients.
Be prepared
The good news? Preparedness doesn’t require panic—just forethought and follow-through. Start with continuity. Every payments business, from ISOs to gateway providers, should have a simple but clear emergency operations plan.
This includes redundant communications, remote access capabilities and cloud backups for critical systems. Regular drills, even if brief, can reveal gaps before a disaster does.
Support merchants
For merchant-facing teams, now is a great time to revisit client check-ins. Ask your merchants: If the power went out today, could they still accept payments? Encourage them to adopt mobile or battery-powered POS options, cloud-based management tools. Also suggest they ensure their payment processing provider offers automatic offline capture.
Likewise, advise merchants to securely store paper records or digitize them if they haven't already. And make sure they know how to contact support—even if their usual office is inaccessible. A wallet card with key contacts, including payment support, can be surprisingly useful when digital access is down.
Stay calm
Beyond tech, it’s about mindset. Encouraging calm, flexible thinking helps people respond instead of react. For example, during a wildfire, that might mean rerouting support teams or shifting merchant communications to unaffected areas. For merchants, it could mean creating signage explaining temporary changes in payment acceptance or inventory delays due to disrupted supply chains.
Inspire confidence
As payment professionals, we are uniquely positioned to foster resilience. By equipping ourselves—and our merchants—with simple tools and strategies today, we can help businesses not only survive the next emergency but come back stronger.
We can’t control the weather. But we can meet its challenges with steadiness, clarity, and a commitment to serve—rain or shine. 
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