Katia Puchkova is an experienced professional with a diverse background in operations and customer success. Currently, she is serving as Chief Operating Officer at xpate.
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The holiday season, marked by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is one of the most anticipated shopping periods of the year for customers and one of the biggest revenue opportunities for merchants. At the same time, the season looks very different on both sides. When customers are hunting for the best deals, merchants are navigating what is essentially a live-fire audit of their entire payments infrastructure, stress-testing everything from routing to risk decisioning.
It turns out that the weakest point isn’t capacity but coordination. When critical systems can’t align in real time, payments get declined, and revenue leaks. These failures reveal deep architectural misalignments between various stakeholders: issuers, acquirers, wallets, and local payment rails. The resulting cracks occur at the deepest levels of the payment stack, showing exactly which parts break down under high concurrency and volatility.
Peak transaction periods expose coordination gaps
In 2025, 68% of merchants prioritized speed and reliability above all else, understanding that a fraction of a second can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. In isolation, a slight delay seems insignificant. However, when millions of transactions are processed every hour, that minor delay accumulates into significant payment latency. This latency can become a bottleneck, slowing authorizations and resulting in lost revenue that accumulates as volumes rise.
Navigating cross-border challenges
Cross-border commerce during these peak seasons further increases payment risk and failure rates even further. Issuers naturally tighten fraud controls for foreign traffic, which can lead to more false declines.
High-performing payment platforms need to accurately respond to and adapt to this shift in issuer behaviour, using historical data and real-time transaction insights to reduce false declines while maintaining security. Without unified visibility across issuers, local wallets, and rails, merchants may struggle to make timely, well-informed decisions.
Consumer payment preferences also vary widely across regions. For example, wallets dominate much of Asia, capturing around 70% of e-commerce transaction value in 2023, while credit cards remain the primary choice in North America, accounting for 71% of point-of-sale transactions and 49% of e-commerce in 2024. In Europe, digital wallets accounted for roughly a third of e-commerce transaction value in 2024, while debit and prepaid cards ranked second in popularity. A modern system must route each transaction intelligently based on currency, region, and user preference to maximize conversion. Ultimately, mastering this global complexity is essential for capturing cross-border revenue.
How volume spikes can affect your cash flow
Beyond transaction failures, volume spikes can critically stress back-end financial functions, including settlement cycles, liquidity management, and reconciliation processes. When these systems lag, money gets “stuck between rails,” exposing it to more risks.
For merchants, especially those running on tight margins, delays in accessing funds can reduce operational flexibility. They may struggle to restock popular items immediately, fulfill new orders requiring swift shipping, or fund marketing campaigns. A delay in settlement directly impacts the entire work cycle.
The hidden cost of disconnected systems
The process becomes unnecessarily complex because many merchants still operate across multiple disconnected providers, often due to legacy constraints or market structure, with each provider handling a different part of the transaction. This fragmented model makes the payment process more susceptible to delays and inefficiencies, especially when large volumes of transactions must be processed simultaneously.
Let’s say a specific provider experiences a higher rate of transaction challenges; a fragmented system can make swift adjustments difficult. Payment data typically needs to move across multiple vendor systems, often requiring multiple distinct API calls. This sequential processing inherently introduces points where delays may occur.
As a result, rerouting the transaction or modifying security rules to address false declines can be delayed. This may affect efficiency and, at times, require additional manual oversight. Ultimately, relying on multiple companies can limit the merchant's ability to exercise complete control and achieve maximum speed during critical periods.
Consequently, the decision to reroute the transaction or adjust security rules to combat false declines is slow, leading to additional delays and, in the worst cases, manual intervention. Ultimately, relying on multiple companies means the merchant sacrifices control and speed when they need it most.
Single-flow infrastructures absorb volume spikes more gracefully because critical decisions aren’t being handed off among multiple disconnected providers. By unifying these functions, merchants gain a clearer, real-time picture of the transaction lifecycle. This consolidation eliminates redundant checks, reduces decision-making friction, and provides the agility to instantly reroute transactions or adjust security protocols, resulting in significantly improved approval rates and faster access to cleared funds.
Recognizing long-term needs during peak seasons
Resilience and consistency matter at all times. The holiday season is often viewed as a one-time surge requiring temporary fixes. But the pressures exposed during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas holidays, and other big spending periods are structural, not just seasonal.
The volume spikes simply test the inherent fragility of coordination within the routing, fraud controls, and cross-border settlement pipelines. While a platform may struggle during a massive holiday surge, this stress test serves as a valuable indicator that the underlying architecture needs further development to achieve the coordination and speed required for seamless performance and typical volatility throughout the rest of the year.
The ideal payment infrastructure should be built to handle that kind of volume any day of the year. The holidays just make the cracks, specifically the cracks in coordination, more evident, serving as a critical reminder for merchants to fortify their payment stacks now, ensuring they're built for all-weather, real-time performance and sustainable long-term growth.
