Besides other kinds of financial risks and risk mitigation measures that need to be taken, operational risk assumes significant importance in the context of retail payments and their settlement mechanisms because of the wider scope of operations of such systems which is not limited to a few players (unlike large-value or inter-bank payment systems).
While Retail payment systems need to be sized appropriately to handle substantial volumes and reduce the load on large-value payment systems, appropriate and well-tested business-continuityplans with sufficient built-in-redundancies should also be in place to ensure availability of the retail payment systems in the eventuality of any disruption / contingency.