Header

Cash saves the day: How cash infrastructure enhances resilience during a card payment system outage

16 September 2026
Aurel Ruben Mäder Christoph Meyer Yves Nacht Daniel Gatica-Perez
Issue 2026-12

Summary

Can cash infrastructure mitigate the adverse effects of a card payment system outage? As cashless payment systems become increasingly prevalent, societies are becoming more vulnerable to technical disruptions such as card payment system outages. This paper investigates a one-day nationwide card payment system outage at a major retailer in Switzerland. To quantify the loss in card sales at the retailer's stores and the increase in cash withdrawals at ATMs, we generate granular counterfactuals by forecasting card payments and cash withdrawals at the store and ATM level. We then use residual-on-residual regressions to control for high-dimensional confounders and estimate the causal effect of outage-induced card payment losses on ATM withdrawals in an event-study framework. Our district-level results suggest that for every 100 lost card payments, there were 11 additional ATM withdrawals. In value terms, for every CHF 100 loss in card payments, ATM withdrawals increased by approximately CHF 68. We also find only limited evidence of increased card payments at competing stores during the outage or at outage-affected stores on the day after the outage. Our findings suggest that cash infrastructure can serve as a resilience buffer during card payment system outages and that consumers rely on cash as their primary fallback payment instrument.

Issue:
12
Pages:
26
JEL classification:
C55, D12, E42, G28
Keywords:
Card payments, ATM withdrawals, Resilience, Payment system risk, Forecasting
Year:
2026

Author(s)

  • Aurel Ruben Mäder

  • Christoph Meyer

  • Yves Nacht

  • Daniel Gatica-Perez

Your settings

Required: These cookies (e.g. for storing your IP address) cannot be rejected as they are necessary to ensure the operation of the website. These data are not evaluated further.
Analytics: If you consent to this category, data such as IP address, location, device information, browser version and site visitor behaviour will be collected. For this, cookies will be stored on your device that record information about your user behaviour. These data are evaluated for the SNB's internal purposes and are kept for two years.
Third-party: If you consent to this category, third-party services (used, for example, to add social multimedia content to the SNB's website) will be activated which collect personal data, process these data, disclose them abroad - worldwide - and place cookies. The relevant data protection regulations are linked in the 'Privacy statement for the website of the Swiss National Bank'.

Choose your preferred settings:

This website uses cookies, analytics tools and other technologies to provide requested features, content and services, to personalise the content shown, to provide links to social media, and to analyse the use of the website in anonymised form for the purposes of improving usability. Personal data are also disclosed abroad - worldwide - to video service providers and the analytics tools of these providers are used. More information is available under 'Manage settings'.