Why Uptime Is the Unsung Hero of B2B Payments

Watch more: What’s Next in Payments: Boost Payment Solutions’ Rinku Sharma

When payments infrastructure makes the news, it’s usually because something has gone wrong.

But the resilience of payments infrastructure, the quiet engine of foundational work that keeps B2B payments systems running, might just have been the headline story of the past year, no matter the ongoing drumbeat of AI announcements and flashy FinTech innovations.

“Platform resiliency and business continuity planning, in my opinion, has been our number one unsung hero,” Rinku Sharma, chief technology officer at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the most recent edition of the What’s Next in Payments Series, “Unsung Heroes.”

“Until stuff all works fine, it’s all great. It’s when it does not work, that’s when we start to question … how resilient is the infrastructure? How performant is it?” Sharma added.

For years, reliability was treated as table stakes. It was a basic expectation, not a strategic edge. The turbulence of 2025 has since altered that mindset, as enterprises found themselves beset by a wave of cloud outages and cybersecurity incidents across major providers. The question was no longer, what can your platform do? but rather, what happens when something, somewhere, breaks?

“When these incidents actually happened, we were able to absorb the shock. We were able to maintain our SLAs and provide our partners with the continued service that they expect of us,” Sharma said, noting that Boost had invested early and heavily in failover capabilities, redundancy models and system hardening.

That operational continuity, staying up when things go down, is fast becoming a differentiator in a world where uptime is brand value, and resilience is sales enablement.

Resilience as a Competitive Strategy

Boost occupies a specialized corner of the payments ecosystem. It orchestrates end-to-end B2B transactions, particularly by automating virtual card payments, between buyers and suppliers, aiming to simplify acceptance, reduce friction and increase visibility.

But with more enterprises shifting to digital payments and transaction volumes rising, the risk profile of operating in the cloud has changed quickly and dramatically. That’s why, in 2025, the company conducted a full simulated failover test — no small undertaking for a firm processing complex commercial transactions. The ability to run those tests successfully isn’t just an IT milestone; it’s a statement to enterprise clients who cannot afford downtime.

Sharma said he sees this work as the primary unsung hero of the year: a deep, quiet investment in resilience. But he’s quick to emphasize that resilience doesn’t stop at uptime. A second pillar, that of security, has also required equally aggressive reinvention.

“The bad actors only have to get it right once. We have to get it right every single time,” he said.

For its own part, Boost this year doubled down on security architecture by expanding endpoint monitoring, enhancing SIEM capabilities, and implementing zero-trust network access to ensure authentication at every point without undue friction for users.

“Security is in our DNA … it is not something that we think after the fact,” Sharma said.

Looking ahead to 2026, Boost is already investing in adaptive risk controls and behavioral analytics, embracing tools that can adjust authentication requirements dynamically based on context. The goal is to catch anomalies before they occur while allowing trusted flows to move quickly.

Data Governance Takes Center Stage

If 2025 was the year payments’ invisible infrastructure finally got some attention, it also marked a turning point for data governance, the unsung hero one step further behind-the-scenes. Every payments company talks about insights; few have the data, governance or architectural maturity to deliver them. Boost believes it now has all three.

“Our biggest advantage is the depth and diversity of the payment data that we manage … having that consolidated into a single governed environment allows us to create actionable insights,” Sharma said.

Those insights help customers grow card programs, improve acceptance rates and uncover revenue opportunities hidden in procurement behavior. It’s a shift from being just a processor to becoming a strategic partner.

Boost’s teams are already producing advanced program and campaign analytics for clients, translating raw transaction flows into decisions that materially improve performance.

“When we pair this with a secure and resilient environment … Boost becomes more than just a regular processor,” Sharma said.

“All of the capabilities needed for a future-state Boost are reliant on having good data governance,” he added.

Orchestration in a Multi-Rail World

As payments become more global, more digital and more modular, merchants and suppliers expect seamless routing across different rail options, from card networks to account-to-account schemes.

“Orchestration … starts with a strong foundation of resiliency, a strong foundation of data and observability,” Sharma said, noting that Boost has embraced a multi-provider strategy, deliberately reducing dependency risk for partners while improving system uptime.

This architectural philosophy dovetails with the company’s own product investments, especially Dynamic Boost, a routing intelligence engine designed to optimize payments across card rails or account-based options.

This capability becomes even more valuable as payments standards evolve. Sharma cited Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP), which shifts merchants toward modernized, more accurate data structures, as an example of how regulatory or network changes can create opportunity.

“We’ve come up with an innovative solution to allow our customers to always get the lowest published rates available at the time of the transaction — enabling a compliance capability into a business opportunity,” he said.

Ultimately, the lesson of the year is becoming this: the future of B2B payments is being built not on the flashiest innovations, but on the most durable ones. Resilience is now a competitive weapon. Clean data is now strategic infrastructure. Architecture is now a product.

And as Sharma highlighted, the firms that master these fundamentals may define the next decade of payments.