Why redundancies are critical for reliable card payments

Enterprise businesses processing payments at scale understand the need for redundancy across the payment ecosystem, which connects a host of different parties responsible for processing a successful transaction. For card transactions, this ecosystem consists of issuing banks, payment processors and switches, acquiring banks, card networks and 3Ds MPIs (3D Secure Merchant Plug-Ins), and each piece has distinct failure points. 

Relying solely on any participant in this ecosystem is not ideal, as there is always the chance, and often reality, that one of these ecosystem participants will fail at any point in time. Without redundancy, when that happens, merchants will be unable to collect payments for a period of time, leading to lost revenue and a poor customer experience.

However, managing multiple payment gateways, bank relationships and authentication methods is time-consuming and resource-intensive. As well, if those ecosystem participants share acquirers or rely only on one 3DS provider - for example Bankserv - issues and downtime would impact them all.

Stitch has always placed emphasis on resilience and redundancy when building out our card offering - ensuring that merchants have peace of mind when choosing Stitch as their preferred card processing partner. With one integration into Stitch, merchants benefit from full redundancy at every step of the card processing ecosystem. 

What does it mean to have redundancy in card payment processing?

In practice, building in redundancy for card processing means that Stitch has done the work across the value chain to ensure there are no single points of failure when processing a card transaction.

Redundancy in card payment processing means having backup systems, service providers or integration pathways in place to ensure continuous and reliable transaction processing, even if one component of the payment ecosystem fails. In practical terms, redundancy means that if one part of the payment processing chain—such as an acquiring bank or 3D Secure authentication provider—experiences downtime, the transaction can be rerouted or switched to an alternative acquirer or provider to maintain the flow without disruption.

Here are some of the key ways redundancy can be enabled for a card processor: 

1. Multiple acquiring banks and MIDs
   ‍By working with more than one acquiring bank,  businesses can ensure that transactions have a backup route if one acquirer encounters technical issues or disruptions.

2. 3D Secure redundancy
   ‍In the event a primary 3DS provider, such as Bankserv, is down, transactions can automatically fall back on a secondary 3DS provider, helping maintain secure authentication and compliance

3. Payment method fallbacks
   ‍In cases where issuing banks are unable to process card payments, alternative payment methods such as Pay by bank can be leveraged, and transactions can be re-routed with minimal disruption to the consumer

4. Load balancing and failover systems
   Some processors implement load balancing and failover configurations to distribute transaction loads across multiple servers or data centres, making sure that heavy traffic or isolated server issues don’t interrupt service

3D Secure: the danger of reliance on a single provider

One of the most critical steps in a card payment process is the point of authentication, during which customers may be asked to enter a unique code sent by their bank or go through a MFA process in their banking app in order to verify that they are the one making the payment.

Failure points for 3Ds authentication can occur for a variety of reasons, often due to:

1. MPIs (like Bankserv) going down
2. Banking apps going down, limiting the customer’s ability to complete MFA 
3. Telco network failures, which limit the customer’s ability to receive OTPs 

Leverage Stitch for reliable card payment processing

At Stitch, ensuring uninterrupted uptime for our merchants is core to our value proposition. We recognise that there is no silver bullet to solving these issues, so we have built a host of alternatives and redundancies to ensure our merchants’ ability to collect payments is not disrupted.

First, we’ve taken a multi-acquirer, multi-processor approach to ensure consistent uptime. This means that if one bank is down, transactions can be automatically rerouted to another, or an alternative method can be presented.

For authentication, we’ve enabled adaptive 3DS. This is an option that gives merchants the power and ability to choose, based on sophisticated transaction rules and risk appetite, when to require 3DS as an additional authentication step when processing a card payment vs when to prioritise providing a more seamless payment experience. Where 3DS is necessary, Stitch has also built in redundancies to ensure that authentication can be completed reliably.

Our team is dedicated to ensuring the most reliable card solution on the market, designed specifically for enterprise businesses with complex payments needs. Get in touch with our sales team to learn more about how we can supercharge your card acceptance process.