FreedomPay on The $44.4 Billion Payment Risk Facing Retail And Hospitality

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, inside the Venetian, surrounded by engineers, operators, and business leaders all wrestling with the same uncomfortable reality. Payment outages are no longer rare edge cases. They are becoming a routine operational risk, and the cost is far higher than many organizations realize.

To unpack that shift, I sat down with Victoria Ruffo, Software Engineering Team Lead at FreedomPay, for a grounded and practical conversation about resilience, observability, and what failure actually looks like in modern commerce.

Victoria explains how FreedomPay supports merchants by orchestrating every part of the payment journey through a single platform, from terminal management to remote updates and even on-device advertising.

If you have checked into a hotel and noticed a payment terminal quietly branded "Secured By FreedomPay," there is a good chance you have already interacted with her team's work. That real-world exposure gives her a clear view of what happens when systems fail and why customers are far less patient than businesses often assume.

We talk about new research from FreedomPay, Dynatrace, and Retail Economics that puts a stark number on the issue. $44.4 billion in U.S. retail and hospitality revenue is at risk every year due to payment disruptions. But as Victoria points out, the most alarming insight is not the headline figure. It is the gap between how long customers are willing to wait and how long outages actually last.

Most consumers abandon a purchase after seven minutes, while many disruptions stretch on for hours. In those early minutes alone, the majority of revenue is already gone.

The conversation moves beyond statistics into lived experience. From lunch breaks cut short by declined payments to stadiums losing an entire event's worth of revenue in a single outage, Victoria shares why these failures are not abstract technical issues. They directly affect 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We also explore why cash-only backups and outdated terminals no longer reflect how people actually pay, and why uneven investment in resilience leaves many merchants dangerously exposed.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 is not using AI to touch cardholder data or write payment code. Instead, tools like Dynatrace Intelligence help teams detect issues faster, identify patterns humans might miss, and move from reaction to anticipation. That shift, she argues, is where real value shows up, especially when seconds and minutes matter.

If you care about payments, customer experience, or the hidden connection between technical failure and business impact, this episode offers a timely reminder that outages do not have to be catastrophic if organizations plan for them properly.

As consumers grow less patient and systems grow more complex, are your payment platforms designed to absorb disruption, or are they quietly waiting to fail at the worst possible moment?

Useful Links

• Connect With Victoria Ruffo
• Learn More About Freedom Pay
• Whitepaper Payment Resilience in an Uncertain World
• Learn More About Dynatrace Perform

Thanks to our sponsors, Alcor, for supporting the show.