Retailers should be prepared for emergency situations in which the payment system is down for 72 hours warns the Dutch National Forum on the Payment System (NFPS). The organization is also advising consumers to keep around €70 per adult in cash and to have multiple means of payment to prepare for such situations.
The NFPS is a joint organization made up of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), other banks, consumer organizations, retail associations, the Dutch Ministry of Finance, and other relevant institutions.
The advice has been issued due to the changing geopolitical and cyber threat landscape. NFPS says that while the reliability of the electronic payment system is high, retailers need to consider that a 3-day outage is a reasonable scenario for business continuity planning.
The NFPS also states that there are several measures which point-of-sale establishments can take to be prepared for situations in which payment terminals do not work. For example, they can make sure they have an additional telecom connection available, from a different telecom provider. Or they can create a QR code that customers can scan to pay an online payment request. Point-of-sale establishments are also advised to be prepared for situations in which customers can only pay with cash in the event of an outage. The NFPS therefore advises retailers to keep enough cash change on hand.
The advice from NFPS will be included in broader advice issued by the central Dutch government under the banner ‘Think Ahead’, to prepare for multi-day outage situations.
