For one payments chief executive, the answer is not another round of controls aimed at an imagined zero, but the kind of adaptation thinking that climate policy has already been forced to adopt.

Scott Dawson is CEO at DECTA UK, part of DECTA, a global payment technology provider offering acquiring, issuing, processing, white label gateway and digital banking services. He has more than 20 years of experience in the payments industry and leads DECTA’s UK strategy, with a focus on growth and on supporting small and medium-sized businesses. In this contributed piece, he argues that payments firms should treat fraud as a standing condition to engineer around. The views expressed are his own.

Shortly after midday on 28 April 2025, the electricity grid serving Spain and Portugal collapsed. Within minutes, terminals in shops from Lisbon to Barcelona stopped talking to their acquirers, ATMs went blank, and across two countries cash briefly became the only thing that worked.

The instructive part of that afternoon was who carried on trading: some merchants had offline capability, backup power, a float in the till, and staff who had been told what to do when the screen goes dark. They kept taking money. Others had built an entire payment operation on an assumption that had held for the whole of their working lives, which is that the power stays on and the cloud is always overhead.

Britain too has been told, in unusually direct language, that its conditions have changed. The Climate Change Committee ‘s latest assessment, A Well-Adapted UK, published in May 2026, concludes that the country was built for a climate that has already gone.

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