{"id":58038,"date":"2025-04-28T17:41:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T17:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/58038\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T17:41:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T17:41:09","slug":"power-cut-leaves-card-users-in-the-lurch-in-spain-portugal-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/58038\/","title":{"rendered":"Power cut leaves card users in the lurch in Spain, Portugal \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>However, the Bank of Spain said that, as of 3:30 p.m. local time, the national and cross-border payments system was working normally, and that any residual problems were down to a lack of back-up power available to bank branches, merchants or consumers. At retailers, it noted, the point-of-sale terminals used to process payments may have run out of battery.<\/p>\n<p>Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has actively tried to reduce the use of cash in Spain in recent years in an effort to reduce tax evasion. In 2021, Spain <a href=\"https:\/\/sgmlegalspain.com\/spains-rules-and-limits-on-cash-payments\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lowered<\/a> the amount of physical cash that businesses could receive in a single transaction to \u20ac1,000 from \u20ac2,500.<\/p>\n<p>However, according to European Central Bank <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecb.europa.eu\/stats\/ecb_surveys\/space\/html\/ecb.space2024~19d46f0f17.en.html#toc7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">data<\/a>, Spain still boasts a relatively high degree of cash usage, which accounts for 57 percent of retail transactions. Around 39 percent of Spanish payments that aren\u2019t online are done through either card or mobile apps.  <\/p>\n<p>The vulnerability of cashless payments to disruption \u2014 either unintentional or deliberate \u2014 hasn&#8217;t gone unnoticed. Last month, Sweden\u2019s central bank warned that it was important for resilience reasons for citizens to keep physical currency ready to use in case of emergency situations. Riksbank Governor Erik Thed\u00e9en referred to the \u201cdeteriorating security situation\u201d in his comments, a nod to nearby Russia.<\/p>\n<p>The incident comes only a few weeks after an equipment malfunction caused an outage lasting several hours at the European Central Bank\u2019s TARGET system for processing wholesale payments. In this instance, however, the most important part of the eurozone\u2019s financial plumbing continued to operate normally, the ECB said.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/13001180-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6528987\"  \/>The vulnerability of cashless payments to disruption \u2014 either unintentional or deliberate \u2014 hasn&#8217;t gone unnoticed. | Rodrigo Jimenez\/EPA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"However, the Bank of Spain said that, as of 3:30 p.m. local time, the national and cross-border payments&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3090],"tags":[331,51,3378,2814,1700,2207,5167,547,3209,3046,20149,8720,30434,332,811,104,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-58038","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-banks","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-currency","11":"tag-data","12":"tag-economy","13":"tag-hospitals","14":"tag-manufacturing","15":"tag-mobile","16":"tag-payments","17":"tag-portugal","18":"tag-public-transport","19":"tag-resilience","20":"tag-riksbank","21":"tag-russia","22":"tag-security","23":"tag-spain","24":"tag-uk","25":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}