How to Measure, Strengthen and Scale Your Payments Strategy

Introducing the Payments Resilience Curve 

Enterprise merchants operate in an environment defined by a constant change. Yet most merchants still view resilience through a narrow lens of failover and outage response. This approach creates blind spots; while a payment setup might appear stable, it will struggle to adapt, scale or optimise over time.  

True resilience is much broader. It’s the ability to withstand disruption, enhance performance, and evolve quickly when your business demands it. To understand this holistic form of resilience, merchants need a clearer way to see where they stand.  

Introducing the Payments Resilience Curve 

The Payments Resilience Curve maps organisations’ payment capabilities and how their resiliency evolves from basic risk management to a lever for growth. Moving from Reactive (focused on firefighting), to Evolving (building resilience foundations), Advanced (actively optimising payment performance), and finally to Future-Ready (using payments as a strategic advantage).  

The resilience curve helps leaders move beyond simply having a backup plan to viewing resilience as a spectrum, one that reflects technology, processes and readiness for change. 

The Four Stages of the Payments Resilience Curve

Reactive: Fighting fires, not building foundations 

Reactive organisations often feel like they’re keeping up until something breaks. They tend to rely on limited failover options and processes that depend heavily on manual intervention. Outages create bottlenecks because routing changes aren't automated. Expansion is halted by integration constraints, and payment performance is difficult to improve as data is fragmented and manual to collate. These merchants might maintain day-to-day operations, but resilience is fragile. A single point of failure can have a disproportionate commercial impact.  

Evolving: Building the basics, still exposed to constraints

Evolving teams are making progress in building broader resilience. They’ve started to diversify providers, modernise parts of the payments stack and reduce reliance on legacy processes. They might have forms of local routing and partial failover in certain markets, but resilience is inconsistent. Some areas perform well, whilst others lag behind. Change remains slow due to old integrations or vendor relationships. The organisation recognises the value of resilience but is not yet benefiting from it consistently. They’re at a tipping point, aware of the gaps but not yet equipped to close them.

Advanced: Strong foundations, focused on performance 

Advanced organisations have moved beyond the basics. They have a more flexible architecture, can add or swap providers with less friction, and use data to guide decisions. Routing strategies become more dynamic, insights improve, and teams can pinpoint issues quickly and act before they escalate. Expansion becomes more predictable because the payments layer isn’t holding the business back. These merchants see resilience not just as a backup but as efficiency, a way to lift acceptance, streamline operations and reduce avoidable costs. However, performance can fluctuate, and innovation is sometimes constrained by limitations of integrations and resources.    

Future-Ready: Resilience as a competitive advantage

Future-ready merchants treat payments resilience as a strategic capability, not a defensive measure. They have an infrastructure that is modular, interoperable and designed to adapt quickly. Automated failover is a given. Tokenisation travels across providers to optimise cost and acceptance. Layered, intelligent routing keeps conversion high and latency low. They test and optimise using real-time data. These merchants don’t just recover from disruption; they sail past it. Their payments infrastructure is used to optimise performance, enhance customer experience and drive business growth.  

Why Your Position on the Payments Resilience Curve Matters

Where you sit on the Payments Resilience Curve shapes how well your business can grow, adapt and protect revenue. Reactive and Evolving organisations lose time, customers and revenue to outages, vendor lock-in constraints and slow change. Advanced businesses perform better but still miss commercial benefits through inconsistent optimisation and legacy integrations. Future-ready organisations move fastest; they expand with confidence, adopt new methods early and turn payments into a competitive advantage. 

Your position on the curve is never fixed, but it will determine how much value your payments infrastructure can unlock.  

The Resilience Pillars Behind the Curve

The five building blocks of modern resilience help businesses decide where they sit on the payments resilience curve.  

• Redundancy: Protect against outages with automated failover and multi-PSP resilience. 

• Flexibility: Adapt rapidly to market demands, remove legacy blockers and scale infrastructure. 

• Interoperability: Connect systems that work together and avoid rebuilding integrations. 

• Optimisation: Use data and orchestration to maximise approvals, reduce cost and improve performance. 

• Future-Readiness: Build capabilities that support personalisation, new payment rails and emerging technologies. 

Learn more about the building block of modern resilience in The Payment Resilience Playbook.

Resilience Is A Capability and Not A Destination

Payments resilience isn’t a one-off project. It’s a capability that strengthens as your business evolves. The Resilience Curve provides a clearer way to understand where you stand today and what becomes possible for your business as you move forward, from reducing risk to optimising performance, unlocking new markets and delivering seamless customer experience. Every organisation progresses at its own pace, but the first step is understanding where you are on the journey.  

See where your business sits on the Payment Resilience Curve.