Black Friday It has become the great annual review of payments. For a few hours, millions of people are buying at the same time, companies force their systems to reach the limit, and any failure at checkout time translates into a lost sale. It’s the day we discover just how dependent our economy is on something as seemingly simple as a properly “incoming” payment.
The scale of the phenomenon is important to understand what we are talking about. In Spain, only the major card payment processing platform was able to organize a Black Friday recently 61 million operations In one day, with a rise of up to 85,000 transactions per minute An annual growth of about 15%. That is, millions of purchasing decisions that ultimately depend on the payment system withstanding pressure without hesitation.
Furthermore, it is important to determine where the risk really lies. It’s not about the website slowing down or even down for a few minutes. This can be annoying, but there is usually a cure. What is crucial is the failure of the “payment part”: the window in which the user enters his data, and the moment when the operation is confirmed. If the chain is broken at that point, the customer’s feeling is that the store has failed, not the payment system. On a day like Black Friday, that final step emphasizes all the value (and all the risks) of the experience. to bear Very negative effects on the brand.
In this scenario, imagining the first Black Friday with a digital euro operational is not an exercise in science fiction, but a useful way to understand where Europe’s payments system is moving. The digital euro will not be a new currency, nor a cryptocurrency, nor an isolated experiment, but a currency Electronic representation of the euro Backed by the European Central Bank, it is designed to coexist with the cash and payment methods we already use.
In practice, for the average consumer, future Black Friday will not have much of a visual change. You’ll still go to a website, choose a product and go to the checkout screen. In the store, you will still bring your cell phone or card closer to the station. The difference will be what happens below: a portion of these transactions will be settled directly on the central bank infrastructure, Using digital money that has the same nature and value as cash, But it moves in real time and in a strictly regulated environment.
Black Friday is a Good mental laboratory To understand what that brings. It’s a day of extreme peak demand, when systems become saturated, response times become critical, and any friction in the checkout process multiplies frustration. In a context where tens of millions of transactions are already reached within a few hours, having an additional “payment lane”, more flexible and less dependent on a few schemes, can make the difference between a successful campaign and one full of abandoned carts. Above all, it enhances what cannot fail: the payment function, the decisive moment when the user confirms the purchase.
And so the first Black Friday for the digital euro It will also be a test of institutional pressure. It’s not just about ensuring that business websites don’t “go down”, but also about verifying that the public infrastructure on which this digital money relies is able to support millions of operations without compromising system stability or user experience. In practice, the check takes place at the checkout window: that moment when the customer has already made a purchase decision and is just waiting for confirmation. If something goes wrong there, what is seen as broken is not Scalpers, or any other brand, but the payment system as a whole.
There is also an element of sovereignty It often goes unnoticed. In recent years, an increasing part of the payments infrastructure we use in Europe relies on non-European players and technologies. The digital euro is, in part, a response to this reality: a way to ensure that an object as crucial as money, in an increasingly digital environment, maintains a clear anchor in public institutions. Applied to Black Friday, this means that a portion of the transactions that drive consumption and trade on that day will depend directly on the European monetary structure.
When that first Digital Euro Black Friday arrives, it likely won’t have big headlines or spectacular spectacles. The most desirable thing is for it to go unnoticed: for people to buy, for companies to get their money, and for the system to tolerate peak demand naturally. The real transformation will not be in what we see on the screen, but in the type of infrastructure that makes this level of trust possible and the ability to Protecting the most sensitive link: the moment of payment.
If those in payments have learned anything from us, it’s that success is measured in the absence of drama: that the user doesn’t have to think about how to move their money, and that the company is able to focus on selling, not chasing incidents. A digital euro, if implemented wisely, could become an essential part of this balance. And Black Friday will definitely happen One of the scenarios where it will be tested.