The structural problem with SLA credits

When your payments or POS go down in peak hours, your losses are not proportional to your software bill.

SLA credits typically:

• refund a slice of your monthly subscription
• cap vendor liability through contract terms

That’s why merchants treat credits as insulting — not because they’re ungrateful, but because the math is broken.

A Friday night outage can wipe out:

• the highest margin hours of the week
• a meaningful share of monthly profit (especially for thin‑margin operators)
• staff time + customer trust (the hidden cost)

A $100/month SaaS credit is not “compensation” for a $3,000–$10,000 revenue hit.

Why traditional BI insurance doesn’t solve short outages

In theory, Business Interruption (BI) is what you’d buy for “we can’t operate.”

In practice, for short tech incidents, BI often fails merchants because:

• waiting periods (time deductibles) are commonly longer than the incident
• claim evaluation becomes dispute‑heavy (“what was the cause?”, “what was the loss?”, “was there physical damage?”)
• settlement is slow relative to the damage timeline

Even when the loss is real, the product and the process were built for fires and floods — not cloud dependencies, payment stack degradation, or POS outages.

What merchants actually want: deterministic payout

Read merchant threads long enough and you see the pattern:

They don’t ask for “risk transfer.” They ask: “Who is going to reimburse me — and when?”

They want:

• a clear rule
• a clear data trail
• a fast, predictable result

Why parametric triggers solve the mismatch

Parametric isn’t magic — it’s just honest about what can be proven quickly.

Instead of arguing about “lost profit,” you agree upfront on:

• Trigger: the measurable failure event (example: “approval success rate drops below X% of baseline for ≥Y minutes”)
• Evidence Pack: what data counts as proof (merchant logs + probes + monitors)
• Payout: a pre‑agreed amount sized to your volume, capped

Then, when it happens:

• verification produces a reproducible YES/NO result
• payout follows the result (not the argument)

That’s the core of ViaVerro: verification, not negotiation.

Who this is for (and who it isn’t)

Best fit:

• multi‑location merchants where card acceptance is the lifeblood
• single‑route stacks (one main provider)
• peak‑hour sensitivity (restaurants, fuel/convenience, high‑throughput retail, paid‑traffic ecommerce)

Not a fit (today):

• businesses mainly hurt by issuer decline spikes, fraud/risk holds, or compliance reserves (those need different triggers and underwriting)

CTA: Get indicative pricing

If you want a fast “does this pencil out?” answer, we can quote an indicative band with minimal inputs.

Send:

• payment stack (PSP/gateway/POS)
• locations + channels (in‑store / online)
• typical hourly card volume in your peak window
• preferred payout size (e.g., €25k / €50k / €100k per incident)
• what you consider an unacceptable incident duration (e.g., 10, 15, 30 minutes)

We’ll reply with:

• a recommended trigger template
• an indicative premium band
• next steps to validate telemetry and coverage terms