England were 45 minutes into their second World Cup group game against Ghana when the country's tills went quiet. Merchants across the country reported card payments failing nationwide, right at half-time of one of the biggest sporting nights of the year. Pubs and venues packed for the match found their terminals frozen mid-round. The kegs stockpiled for the game all stayed full and the kitchen fryers empty, as customers ran out to queue at cash machines instead of the bar.

The cause: a third-party power outage at one of the UK's largest payment processors, which knocked out transaction authorisations across multiple platforms it runs. The processor has apologised and said engineers were working to restore service. But for a couple of hours on one of the busiest trading nights of the football calendar, a huge slice of UK retail and hospitality simply couldn't take a card payment.

One detail stood out. Heaton Sports and Cricket Club, a small venue, told customers they could pay by bank transfer instead. While bigger operators turned people away or scrambled for a working card reader, a cricket club kept selling pints.

That's the whole story, really.

A World Cup lesson in resilience

Football fans - and most teams - understand the need for resilience and adaptability. You don't go into a tournament with one game plan or a single source of failure in one or two players. You build a bench. You have a plan B that isn't a downgrade, just a different way to win.

Payments need the same thinking. A huge share of UK retail and hospitality runs through a small number of card processors. When one of them goes down, the outage doesn't stay contained. It ripples out instantly to thousands of shops, pubs and supermarkets that all happened to be plugged into the same plumbing. 

Contactless now accounts for the vast majority of UK debit card transactions, which means most businesses have quietly gone card-only over the past few years. Fewer customers carry cash to bail them out when the network blinks.

Heaton Sports and Cricket Club's answer was creative adaptability; a second route to get paid that didn't depend on the same rails as everyone else queuing at the cash machine.

That second route is exactly what Pay by Bank offers, at scale, all the time, not just when the other system has fallen over.

Why Pay by Bank can change the equation

Pay by Bank is not just another iteration of card payment with the same vulnerabilities. It is built on a different technology stack altogether. Payments are processed by third parties like TrueLayer, and money moves across the UK’s Faster Payment system. The money moves directly from a consumer’s bank to a merchant’s bank; as it used to be called, ‘account to account’. No card schemes or card processors involved. 

Pay by Bank adds to the mix of UK payment options, building resilience when there are inevitable downages on one or many payment systems.

Resilience makes the difference for a merchants bottom line; this outage hit during a sold-out England match-  the kind of night that can make or break a pub's month. Businesses that had a working backup kept trading. Businesses that didn't, lose real revenue, on top of the reputational dent of turning paying, hungry or thirsty customers away.

The UK Government has already clocked this risk. In 2024 the National Payments Vision kicked off work to make account to account payments ubiquitous, noting the importance of ‘system resilience’. 

The Vision has already led to the launch of the UK Payments Initiative, which will help ensure that Pay by Bank can grow as an alternative to cards, both online and in store. 

The Bank of England is also looking into replacing and upgrading Faster Payments - which will put Pay by Bank in an even better position to provide a resilient alternative. 

Building the bench

The businesses that kept the taps flowing this week weren't the ones with the fanciest tech. They were the ones with a second option ready before they needed it. Pay by Bank gives businesses exactly that: a resilient, independent payment route that sits alongside cards rather than replacing them. 

Because outages on big nights will happen again.  The only question is whether your business is the cricket club still serving pints, or the pub with a queue out the door and a till that won't take a tap