The outage, which began at 15:16 local time, was attributed to a disconnection in the 500 kV transmission system in Norte Chico, according to the National Electric Coordinator. This event not only interrupted basic services and generated traffic chaos, but also highlighted the vulnerability of transactional services in emergency situations.
What is the impact of an unexpected event on transactional services?
Transactional services such as electronic payments, wire transfers and online transactions are critically dependent on a stable electrical infrastructure. During the blackout, although the financial industry was not greatly affected, there was a proven drop in electronic transfers, and many merchants were unable to process card payments due to the lack of connection, forcing customers to resort to cash or, failing that, to postpone their purchases. This disruption not only affects customer convenience, but also has significant economic repercussions for businesses that rely on these types of transactions. How can your financial services business anticipate these types of events and successfully overcome them?
Measuring the impact on transactional services
To understand and mitigate the effects of outages and other mass events on transactional services, it is essential to establish clear metrics and evaluation methods:
1. Length of outage: measure the total time during which transactional services were down. This helps to quantify the magnitude of the impact and identify critical areas requiring improvement.
2. Volume of transactions not processed: Record the number of transactions that could not be completed during the outage. This data is crucial for assessing direct economic losses to both businesses and financial institutions.
3. Customer satisfaction: Conduct post-event surveys to gauge the perception and satisfaction of affected customers. Customer confidence can be affected after significant outages, affecting future use of electronic services.
4. Recovery time: Evaluate the length of time required to restore transactional services once power is restored. A long recovery time may indicate the need to implement more efficient backup systems or more effective emergency protocols.
Strategies to mitigate the impact
Given the possibility of future events of this magnitude, it is imperative that companies and financial entities adopt proactive measures to guarantee the continuity of transactional services:
The massive blackout in Chile has demonstrated the maturity and strength of transactional services in the face of power outages. Measuring the impact of these events through clear indicators and adopting preventive strategies are fundamental steps to strengthen the resilience of the financial system, which is precisely the key to the good management of this specific event.
While investment in backup infrastructure, the implementation of a redundant data center, the acquisition of cloud infrastructure and the integration of business continuity protocols and effective monitoring and response are essential pillars to ensure operational continuity in adverse scenarios, it is also essential to be able to rely on experts to implement these services and that these in turn have the ability to provide cloud solutions that expand beyond the region and can be executed globally.
Handling critical events of this magnitude in the financial industry and in the current context means losing the fear of handling new cloud models that are not only robust and versatile, but also have the high availability and flexibility necessary to generate peace of mind for your company and your customers, going a step beyond existing models and local regulations.
In CLAI PAYMENTS® Technologies we have the experience to integrate resilient platforms, with disaster continuity schemes, an omnichannel platform in traditional and Cloud models that will not only allow you to have a capacity for constant evolution, but also the support and flexibility you need to effectively deal with this type of events.
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