Estonia's largest retail chains participated on Wednesday morning in exercises organized by the Bank of Estonia, during which communication was interrupted for an hour in six stores across the country.
During the communication outage, people could only pay for purchases using a physical bank card with a PIN code.
The largest commercial banks, together with the Bank of Estonia and retail enterprises, have been working on a solution for offline card payments for some time. This will allow residents of Estonia to make purchases with a bank card in a limited number of stores if regular network connections and card payments are not functioning.
The exercises for practicing offline payments, held as part of the large-scale ILVES 2026 exercises, involved the largest grocery chains in Estonia: Selver, Coop, Grossi Toidukaubad, Maxima, Rimi, and Lidl. The exercises gave retail chains confidence that offline card payments generally work; however, small adjustments are needed for this crisis solution to operate more smoothly.
During the exercises, it became clear that the biggest challenge during the communication outage occurred when a person wanted to pay only contactlessly, without having a physical bank card or cash on hand. "During the hour of exercises, only a few were unable to make purchases in stores. Mostly, these were young people who did not have a bank card with them. Banks have developed an important new backup solution for card payments, but now we need to inform people more that in case of a failure, a physical bank card and PIN code will be as useful as a small amount of cash. Although it is more convenient to move around with just a phone or smartwatch, we still ask people to consider that contactless payment does not work without an internet connection or during other failures in the card payment system," said Rainer Olt, head of the payment systems department at the Bank of Estonia.
The goal of offline payments is to provide residents with the ability to purchase essential goods, primarily food, medicine, and fuel, even in a crisis situation accompanied by failures in the card payment system. This can occur, for example, during an internet connection outage, a failure in information systems, or as a result of a cyberattack.
