Payments Modernization: On time, on budget, and other fairy tales

Imagine you run a cozy neighborhood bakery. You’ve got loyal customers, a steady stream of orders, and a card reader that’s your lifeline (because hardly anyone carries cash anymore).

Now picture this: it’s Saturday morning, your busiest time. The smell of fresh croissants is pulling in a crowd. But suddenly your payment system goes down. No card payments. No online orders. Just a blinking screen and a line of frustrated customers. You call support, but they say it’s a system-wide issue.

You’re not alone. Hundreds of other small businesses are stuck too. You lose hours of sales. Some customers walk out. Others promise to come back. But you know many won’t. You’re left with wasted inventory, lost revenue, and a sinking feeling that you’re powerless when the tech fails.

Now scale that up.

The real cost of payments outages

In February 2025, the European Central Bank’s multi-trillion-euro operation was knocked offline for seven hours. In the same month, the UK Treasury wrote to the chief executives of nine major banks and building societies, asking why they had experienced 803 hours—more than 33 days—of unplanned outages over the previous two years. Then, in April, Citibank, which serves 200 million customers and manages $1.6 trillion in assets, suffered a nationwide outage.

The consequences are severe. Outages disrupt sales, damage reputations, and strain relationships between businesses and their banks. The annual global cost is estimated at $400 billion. In the UK alone, retail and hospitality businesses are reported to lose £73 million every minute during downtime. And it’s not just businesses that suffer. Every outage means ordinary people can’t pay bills, buy school uniforms, or complete their weekly shopping.

Why does this keep happening?

Legacy banking systems. A shortage of payments expertise. Endless regulatory updates. System upgrades that take place at risky times. Evolving fraud risks. Internal software failures and change management. Third-party dependencies. Resilience. Consumer expectations never stand still.

Even minor updates can cause cascading failures. A single bump can take a system down. So banks play it safe. Because in payments, 99% right isn’t good enough. But safety stalls innovation. Meanwhile, pressure mounts. Banks are running just to stay in place. Business as usual is no longer an option. Something must change.

That’s why we wrote this report. We spoke to 300 senior payments professionals to uncover the real blockers to modernization. Our hypothesis was simple: banks are struggling to keep up with the rate of change. We wanted to know what’s holding them back.

Download the report.