What really happens to a business when payments stop working, even for a few minutes?
I recorded this episode live at Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, at the Venetian, surrounded by engineers, operators, and business leaders all grappling with the same uncomfortable reality. Payment failures are no longer rare edge cases. They are becoming a routine operational risk and the costs are much higher than many organizations realize.
To unpack that shift, I sat down with Victoria Ruffo, Software Engineering Team Lead at FreedomPay, for an informed and practical conversation about resilience, observability, and what failure actually looks like in modern commerce.
Victoria explains how FreedomPay supports merchants by organizing every part of the payment journey through a single platform, from terminal management to remote updates and even on-device advertising.
If you’ve checked into a hotel and noticed a payment terminal with the silent inscription “Secured By FreedomPay,” chances are you’ve already interacted with the work of its team. This practical experience gives her a clear picture of what happens when systems fail and why customers are much less patient than companies often assume.
We talk about new research from FreedomPay, Dynatrace and Retail Economics that puts a clear number on this issue. Annually, $44.4 billion in retail and hospitality revenue is at risk due to payment disruptions. But as Victoria notes, the most alarming insight is not the headline figure. It is the gap between how long customers are willing to wait and how long the outage actually lasts.
Most consumers abandon a purchase after seven minutes, while many disruptions can last for hours. In those first few minutes alone, most of the sales have already disappeared.
The conversation goes beyond statistics and into lived experiences. From lunch breaks cut short by denied payments to stadiums losing an entire event’s revenue at once, Victoria explains why these failures aren’t abstract technical issues. They have a direct impact on staff wages, customer loyalty and long-term brand trust.
We also explore why cash-only backups and outdated terminals no longer reflect how people actually pay, and why uneven investments in resilience leave many merchants dangerously exposed.
AI plays a central role in the discussion, but not in the way hype cycles often suggest. Victoria is clear that FreedomPay does not use AI to touch cardholder data or write payment codes. Instead, tools like Dynatrace Intelligence help teams spot problems faster, identify patterns people may miss, and move from reaction to anticipation. That shift, she argues, is where real value emerges, especially when seconds and minutes matter.
If you’re worried about payments, customer experience, or the hidden connection between technical failure and business impact, this episode is a timely reminder that outages don’t have to be catastrophic if organizations plan for them well.
As consumers become less patient and systems become more complex, are your payment platforms designed to handle disruptions, or are they quietly waiting to fail at the worst possible time?
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