83% of businesses rate it as ‘very important’ or ‘important’ that transactions are completed in two seconds, according to DOJO’s “State of Payments in Spanish Retail” report.
This data underscores the strategic weight of payments within business operations and highlights the importance of removing technological barriers that affect service delivery and the customer experience. In this context, DOJO identifies the five invisible fintech frictions impacting the operations of Spanish retailers.
1. Manual processes slow daily agility
While the fintech sector is moving toward automation, some routine tasks are still performed manually. This includes closing the cash register at the end of a shift and entering the amount into the card terminal. These situations increase errors, consume time that the team could devote to high-value tasks, and erode the speed customers demand.
In sectors like retail and HoReCa (hospitality), which experience spikes in demand, dependence on analog processes significantly limits a business’s ability to scale. Service must be fast and flawless. This underscores the importance of financial automation and implementing payment solutions that address this priority.
2. Point-of-sale system outages are a strategic problem
In recent months, some technology providers have experienced service issues, resulting in the interruption of payment systems for thousands of merchants. Even lasting a few minutes, a network outage translates not only into financial losses but also into eroding consumer trust.
In this scenario, tech resilience ceases to be a value-added feature and becomes a reliability requirement. Having a redundant network, backed by distributed infrastructure, multi-cloud architectures, and automatic recovery mechanisms, is key to avoiding collapse and guaranteeing continuity during moments of peak demand.
3. The abundance of disconnected tools creates more friction
It’s common for a merchant to rely on multiple independent platforms to manage day-to-day processes: inventory, invoicing, payments, orders, customer service… Far from streamlining processes, this fragmentation creates duplicates, operational errors, and difficulties in maintaining a unified view of the business.
In this regard, the latest fintech solutions enable effective, real integration between systems. This moves away from operational complexity and toward a smoother, interoperable, scalable infrastructure in which all areas of the business are connected.
4. Lack of visibility limits decision-making
Digitizing processes generates a wealth of strategic information on consumer patterns, the evolution of channel-by-channel sales, and payment method preferences. However, some companies lack the tools to transform this data into actionable insights over time and to adapt the commercial plan with agility.
In an increasingly competitive environment, the ability to interpret payment-derived data, among other processes, will be crucial for optimizing inventory, staff scheduling, and maximizing the impact of promotions. The challenge is less about processing transactions and more about turning this moment into a source of operational intelligence.
5. Regulatory compliance as an operational challenge
The advent of the VeriFactu Regulation marks a major precedent in digitalization and traceability of transactions. For many organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, adapting to this regulation adds an extra challenge to an already accelerating push toward digitizing processes.
The fintech sector has already developed solutions that facilitate regulatory compliance in a transparent and automated way, preventing regulatory adaptation from creating additional friction in the payment experience, affecting the agility and fluidity of service, or increasing the business’s operational burden.
“Beyond having a significant operational and economic impact, many of the inefficiencies that affect commerce are perceptible to the consumer. Technology is an ally capable of eliminating them when applied to promote integration, ensuring system fluidity and process synchronization,” says Jesús Molina, Head of Partners and Resellers at Dojo.
