Managing Cashless Payment System Outages for Music Festivals.

Most music festivals operate cashless payment environments which rely on RFID wristbands and a robust infrastructure that enables secure convenient payments. Any failure of the cashless payment systems on a music festival site can lead to significant problems. What are the common causes of outages and how can organisers plan for robust cashless payments.

The majority of festival organisers, festival-goers and vendors find the cashless payment systems available on a typical festival site convenient and practical. This is great until the cashless payment systems go down impacting vendor queuing times and lost revenue plus anger amongst festival-goers and vendor operators. What steps can organisers take to plan a resilient system that is fully tested and has contingencies built in from the start.

Common Causes of Cashless Payment Outages.
There is rarely a single factor that causes a cashless payment system to fail and is likely to involve several elements that can include networks, hardware, software, and operational issues. Connectivity problems are the most common cause of outages usually due to overloaded mobile networks, poor Wi-Fi infrastructure, and bandwidth bottlenecks (at peak times). The system architecture used on servers can be overloaded due to a spike of transactions or lack of built-in redundancy, load balancing, or cloud scaling. If the hardware (RFI wristbands and POS systems) are poorly configured, they may fail to work correctly. Power outages can also impact critical payment systems if no backup power (ups) has been built in for such occurrences. Less common are software bugs in payment systems or an integration failure which can prevent transactions from taking place.

Planning a Robust Cashless Payment Environment.
From the outset, organisers should implement a comprehensive cashless payment system that includes documented processes and procedures for staff and vendors to follow in the event of an outage. POS systems should be able to continue to take payments and queue transactions locally until full systems are restored. Setting a transaction limit can help mitigate risks until connectivity is restored, at which point the syncing of locally stored transaction history should be automatic. In some cases, it may be necessary to build in the ability to temporarily activate cash payments although this can be challenging when very few festival-goers or vendors carry cash.

Building Reliability and Resilience.
The best cashless payment environments will be built with multi-layer redundancy where all POS systems have an offline mode capability where transactions can be stored locally. The connectivity network should be built with multiple paths utilising Wi-Fi, 4G/5G routers, and backup SIMS from different carriers. Best practice on a festival site is to create a segregated secure network dedicated to payment systems so that it is not impacted by mainstream networks being used by festival-goers. Getting festival-goers to preload their cashless app accounts with funds before the event can help prevent top up issues commonly experienced once on site. All cashless payment systems should be thoroughly stress tested before the event live dates through simulated peak load scenarios. Using a proven cashless payments infrastructure provider can give peace of mind, and they often provide on-site technical support and work to documented SLAs.

Real Time Monitoring and Contingency Plans.
Festival organisers should have access to a dashboard that monitors and provides a status of cashless payment systems. This is usually found in the event’s control centre where operations managers are monitoring and controlling every aspect of the event. These dashboards should provide real-time data on transaction success rates, latency spikes, and device connectivity by site zone. Preset alerts enable organisers to quickly deploy network or systems engineers to rectify any issues. Festival staff and vendors should be thoroughly trained on how to switch POS systems into offline modes and apply transaction limits. A pre-defined communication protocol should be created so that all vendors and festival-goers are notified in a timely manner about any outages. Clear messages through push notifications or on the festival app can announce that cashless payments are temporarily unavailable, but that offline modes have been implemented which may cause some delays for example.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

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