Prepare for major payment failure with good fallback options

22 May 2025

The Maatschappelijk Overleg Betalingsverkeer (MOB), with Betaalvereniging Nederland and other participants, has issued advice for consumers and entrepreneurs on how they can prepare for payments emergencies that last for three days.

Persoon scant met smartphone een QR-code op een kassabon aan een cafétafel, wat mobiel betalen en digitale afhandeling van een rekening toont.

Digital fallback options for entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs who want to continue making secure, efficient and accessible payments with customers in an emergency situation for as long as possible can keep one or two digital fallback options in reserve. This could include a battery-powered mobile payment terminal through an alternative transaction processor and telecom provider. It could also be mobile payment requests via a QR code, on a smartphone or tablet.

There are half a dozen different digital fallback options in the Netherlands for retailers to choose from, something for everyone.

Partial failure of digital payment chains

Most outages in the past affected one bank, one transaction processor, one telecom company, one internet provider or one area where power went out. For those kinds of partial outages, there are suitable digital fallback options for any business owner. This allows them to delay the fallback to cash only until an emergency situation potentially worsens to the complete failure of all digital communications.

Total failure of power and telecoms

An emergency situation in which electricity, telephony and internet all fail completely simultaneously is rare. In that case, you can only pay with cash and with so-called ‘deferred PIN payments’, at suitable battery-powered PIN terminals (offline PIN payments at the point of sale).

Entrepreneurs can ask their PIN service provider about the possibilities and conditions of deferred PIN payments.

Advice for consumers

For consumers, the main advice is to keep enough cash on hand per person, €70 for an adult and €30 for a child. In addition, consumers can keep several digital payment instruments:

an additional debit or credit card, from another bank;
a smartphone with a working banking app, for quick cash transfers to merchants and for scanning QR codes in payment requests from merchants.

Read the full MOB advice to consumers and entrepreneurs

Read all about fallback options for entrepreneurs..