The Resilience of the Norwegian Financial Infrastructure for Payment Terminals

Payment terminals, now seen as critical infrastructure (CI), play a key role in ensuring the business continuity of actors within the financial system. They have also an impact on the trust of consumers in the banking system. As for any other system, this type of CI faces the challenges caused by digitalization of services. An important example is when Norwegian payment terminals were struck by an error on 16 May 2022. This incident and others like it highlight the vulnerabilities inherent in our interconnected financial sector. This study examines how resilience concepts and methods can enhance preparedness in Norway's financial sector, with a focus on payment terminals. It examines organizational collaboration, lessons from past failures, and current practices to assess the sector's capacity to manage future disruptions. In-depth interviews with key stakeholders provide insights into strategies that strengthen technical and organizational resilience, supporting business continuity under increasing risk and uncertainty. To analyze the study's findings, we use three different themes from the DARWIN Generic Resilience Management Guidelines: (1) supporting the coordination and synchronization of emergency-response operation activities, (2) managing adaptive capacity, and (3) resilience assessment from learning perspective. Among others, this study reveals preparedness for payment terminals is technically strong, but applying resilience principles systematically would better equip the sector to handle complex future disruptions.

Keywords: Payment terminals, resilience, preparedness, crisis management, critical infrastructure.