Every year, the commercial calendar marks some of the most important dates globally in terms of transactional activity. Just to size up the effect they have on customer consumption in financial services, Black Friday 2023 managed to raise $70.9 billion around the world according to Salesforce. With the magnitude sized the question is, is your payments ecosystem aware of the high transactional dates and ready to deal with them?
As the end of the year approaches, key dates for the financial industry begin to appear and with them, the challenge of sustaining your operation in these days of high transaction volume, without failures or crashes that could represent an impact on your customers, a reputational crisis and a significant loss for your company. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s and Father’s Day are some of the most important commercial dates for the global financial market and facing them requires a solid preparation throughout your payment ecosystem.
Here is a list of industry best practice recommendations to take into account in the operation of your payment platform to successfully overcome these commercial dates:
-
Early load testing: with high transaction dates already stipulated and the experience of previous years, apply load testing on previous days to evaluate how your platform responds to increases in traffic and, thus, you will be able to have clarity on how many transactions your payment ecosystem can handle simultaneously before presenting failures in the operation.
-
Stress tests: Unlike load tests that simulate the traffic your payment platform can handle without failure, stress tests push your ecosystem to the limit, generating more traffic than it can handle to examine how well it can recover after a failure. It is essential to apply them to have a contingency plan in place beforehand.
-
Real-time monitoring and analysis: With good tracking of your customers' behavior prior to and during the trading day, you can implement tools that allow you to quickly detect any failures or developments in your systems and correct any problems or interruptions that arise.
-
Optimization of the performance and loading speed of your payment platform: By improving your user experience, you reduce the possibility of customer abandonment, which implies a reduction of bottlenecks on days when transactional peaks are higher than expected.
-
Compliance with security standards and use of tools such as tokenization : Aunque es una estrategia que debe ser aplicada a diario en un ecosistema de pagos, las fechas comerciales de alto impacto requieren un especial cuidado de la información sensible. Al aumentar las transacciones, también se incrementan las amenazas de fraude. Implementa herramientas como la tokenización, la verificación en dos pasos, entre otras indicadas en estándares como PCI.
-
Build a strong support team: At the time of a high transactional load, the support team must be ready to address any operational issues or system failures that may arise. Being prepared as a company to respond to unforeseen events requires a knowledgeable, attentive and committed team on board.
-
Preventive activities: Risk Scan, capacity projection.
Although these dates offer unique opportunities for the consolidation of your payment platform, the challenges must be prepared and addressed with scalability, security and continuous testing that will allow you to offer the best service to your customer. At CLAI PAYMENTS® Technologies we can be your partner with a testing system that will allow you to evolve and circumvent high transactional traffic events.
With PAYTESTER® turn your payment platform into an effective, prepared and profitable platform with the scalability you need, keeping pace with the market and implementing new payment services with the peace of mind of operating without interruptions, failures or crashes. Get ready for these dates with us and generate the confidence that your customers need.
If you want to know more about PAYTESTER®, leave us your information below and our specialized team will contact you.
