Iliad chief says payment resilience depends on testing at scale

Payment providers face rising pressure to demonstrate that their systems can withstand disruption, not only comply with new operational rules, according to Anthony Walton, chief executive of Iliad Solutions. In a Finextra community post, Walton said the Digital Operational Resilience Act, known as DORA, has intensified the focus on resilience across financial services, but he framed the issue as a practical operating requirement rather than a compliance exercise.

Walton said the payments industry has long understood that service interruptions can occur, and that the relevant test for providers is whether they can absorb disruption, restore service and keep customers supported. For payment firms, he argued, that confidence comes from testing systems under conditions that resemble live operations.

The argument comes as payment infrastructure becomes more interconnected. Walton pointed to real-time payments, ISO 20022 migration, open banking, cloud platforms and reliance on third parties as factors that have changed how money moves. He also cited rising transaction volumes, demanding customer expectations and the high cost of downtime as reasons why providers need to look beyond whether a platform works in standard conditions.

Testing beyond the normal transaction path

Walton said the relevant question for payment platforms is whether they continue to operate when volumes rise unexpectedly, a key service is unavailable, a third-party supplier fails or an infrastructure component behaves unpredictably. He described those scenarios as testing issues that should be examined before they appear in production.

Traditional payment testing often centres on confirming that a function works and that new changes have not damaged existing services, Walton said. He argued that this remains necessary but is too narrow for modern payment environments. In his view, testing should also assess how the wider payment ecosystem performs under real operating stress.

That means simulating traffic loads, service failures and other adverse conditions before a product goes live, according to Walton. The mechanism is straightforward: a provider recreates the pressures and failures that may affect payment flows, then observes whether the chain continues to function, degrades safely or exposes weaknesses that need remediation.

Walton said resilience cannot be established by documentation alone. He argued that firms need evidence from large-scale testing that payment infrastructure can keep performing when conditions differ from the planned operating model.

DORA shifts attention to business services

Walton linked the testing agenda to regulatory scrutiny of critical business services. He said DORA raises expectations for operational resilience, with the broader aim of protecting the financial ecosystem. Regulators, he added, want firms to identify weaknesses before customers experience them.

Iliad Solutions works with banks, payment processors and financial institutions on testing these types of scenarios, Walton said. He described the work as broader than proving that a payment message can travel between two points. The objective, he said, is to give organisations confidence that payment infrastructure will perform when conditions are outside the ordinary.

Walton also argued that resilience testing can support faster change. Where organisations trust their testing capability, he said, they can introduce changes, adopt new payment schemes and innovate without adding operational risk.

For payment firms expected to provide continuous availability, Walton said resilience has become a competitive issue. Customers generally expect successful transactions, he said, and tend to remember failures. His conclusion was that providers should build resilience into payment systems from the outset and use testing to prove that it exists.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.