Opayo systems failure affecting some retail card transactions

Card payments are being affected at a number of Irish supermarkets and other retailers by a major systems failure at Opayo, the payments processor formerly known as Sage Pay.

A note on the website of Opayo, which is a smaller rival of Irish payments giant Stripe, says its system is currently "down". It says its engineers are working on a technical solution to the problem, which appears to have started shortly after lunchtime on Monday, resulting in customers who try to pay by card at the tills having their transactions declined.

Some Irish retailers suggested online that they had been told that the outage affected the whole of the UK and Ireland. The Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland (BPFI), the representative body for the payments sector here, said it was “looking into whether there is an issue”.

Investigating

“At this point it does not seem to be a widespread issue, but we are investigating it,” said BPFI. The issue appears to have so far affected card transactions at certain outlets of SuperValu and also an off-licence chain, as well as bookshops and other smaller retailers.

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Opayo is owned by US financial services business Elavon, which bought the UK and Ireland business of Sage Pay for about $300 million (€272 million) in 2019, and rebranded it. Opayo says it works with about 50,000 merchants in the UK and Ireland.