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Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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The financial landscape stands at a critical juncture. With discussions of currency resets, the potential destabilization of stablecoin pegs, and increasing geopolitical tensions affecting global monetary policy, SaaS companies operating in the fintech space face unprecedented systemic risk. According to a 2024 Bank for International Settlements report, the interconnectedness of digital currencies and traditional financial systems has created "novel transmission channels for financial shocks" that most organizations remain unprepared to address.
For SaaS executives whose platforms process payments, manage treasury operations, or facilitate cross-border transactions, a currency depeg event could cascade through your systems in ways that stress tests and standard disaster recovery plans simply won't catch. The question isn't whether you should prepare—it's whether your preparation will actually work when it matters.
A well-designed tabletop exercise offers the most cost-effective method to identify blind spots in your operational resilience before a real crisis hits. But most organizations approach these exercises with the wrong framework, treating them as compliance theater rather than genuine discovery mechanisms. Here's how to run a depeg tabletop exercise that uncovers the gaps your organization doesn't know it has.
Why Traditional Stress Testing Misses Currency Depeg Scenarios
Most financial stress tests focus on gradual deterioration or single-point failures. Currency depegs, by contrast, are characterized by sudden, discontinuous breaks in assumed relationships. When TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, it lost 99% of its value in under 48 hours. According to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the event triggered cascading failures across 43 interconnected DeFi protocols—failures that individual protocol stress tests had rated as "extremely unlikely."
For SaaS companies, the implications extend beyond direct crypto exposure. A major currency reset scenario could involve:
- Sudden revaluation of reserve currencies affecting multi-currency pricing models
- Payment processor disruptions as settlement networks recalibrate
- Liquidity crises affecting your banking partners or payment rails
- Contractual ambiguities when denominational assumptions break down
- Customer behavior changes as they rush to preserve value or exploit arbitrage
Your standard incident response playbook likely assumes continuous system operation with degraded performance. A depeg scenario may require you to make strategic decisions about halting transactions entirely—decisions that have never been tested in a realistic environment.
Designing Your Depeg Scenario: Start With Second-Order Effects
The failure mode of most tabletop exercises is starting with an unrealistic scenario that participants immediately dismiss as implausible. Your scenario needs to be specific enough to feel real while encompassing enough uncertainty to prevent participants from simply pattern-matching to existing playbooks.
Rather than beginning with "assume all stablecoins depeg simultaneously," construct a scenario with a realistic trigger and then map the cascade:
Example Scenario Framework:
A major European banking crisis leads to emergency capital controls in three EU member states. Within 72 hours, USDC experiences a 15% depeg as Circle's Euro reserves become temporarily illiquid. This triggers automated liquidations across DeFi protocols, creating a reflexive cycle. Two major payment processors suspend settlement operations "pending regulatory clarity." Your largest customer segment operates in affected regions.
Notice this scenario includes ambiguity: Is the depeg temporary? Will it spread? What does "pending regulatory clarity" actually mean for your settlement timeframes? This ambiguity is crucial—it forces participants to make decisions without complete information, exactly as they would in a real crisis.
The Center for Financial Stability notes that "information cascades under uncertainty" represent the highest risk factor in modern financial crises. Your tabletop exercise should explicitly test how your organization makes decisions when the situation is still developing.
The Participant Mix That Actually Uncovers Gaps
The composition of your tabletop exercise participants determines what gaps you'll find. Most organizations make the mistake of inviting only senior leaders or only technical teams. Neither approach reveals the coordination breakdowns that define real incidents.
Your participant list should include:
- Engineering leadership (who understands system capabilities and constraints)
- Finance/Treasury (who understands contractual obligations and liquidity)
- Customer Success/Account Management (who understands customer impact and communication)
- Legal/Compliance (who understands regulatory and contractual implications)
- Product Management (who must make prioritization decisions under constraints)
- At least one board member or C-suite executive (who may need to authorize extraordinary measures)
Critically, these individuals should participate together in a single session, not in parallel streams that are later reconciled. According to research from the Harvard Business School on organizational resilience, "cross-functional coordination failures account for 73% of response effectiveness gaps in novel crisis scenarios." You cannot identify these coordination failures if the functions never actually attempt to coordinate.
The Pre-Exercise Audit That Sets Up Success
Before running the tabletop exercise, conduct a pre-mortem specifically focused on currency-related assumptions embedded in your systems:
Documentation to review:
- All pricing and billing logic that assumes stable currency relationships
- Payment processor failover procedures and their currency handling
- Customer contracts with currency-specific terms or settlement provisions
- Treasury management policies and their embedded FX assumptions
- System monitoring thresholds that might behave unexpectedly during volatility
One SaaS CFO I spoke with discovered during their pre-exercise audit that their billing system had a hard-coded assumption that USD/EUR would remain within a 20% band. During extreme volatility, the system would simply error out rather than processing transactions—a failure mode that had never been documented or tested.
Document these assumptions explicitly. They become your exercise's "hidden vulnerabilities" that participants must discover through the scenario.
Running the Exercise: Structure Over Improvisation
The exercise itself should follow a structured timeline that matches how a real depeg crisis would unfold:
Hour 0-2: Initial Detection and Assessment
Present the initial scenario and first indications. Your monitoring systems detect anomalies. Customer support receives confused inquiries. A major payment processor sends an ambiguous status update.
Key question to force: Who has the authority to halt payment processing, and what criteria would trigger that decision?
Hour 2-8: Cascade Development
Introduce second-order effects based on participant decisions. If they chose to continue processing payments, some transactions fail in unexpected ways. If they halted processing, customers begin churning to competitors. A board member receives a concerned call from a major investor.
Key question to force: How do you communicate with customers when you don't yet know the full extent of the impact or the timeline for resolution?
Hour 8-24: Strategic Response
The situation has developed into a clear crisis, but the path forward remains uncertain. Participants must make resource allocation decisions, potentially including engineering roadmap disruption, customer remediation, and financial reserves deployment.
Key question to force: What customer data do you need to prioritize remediation, and can you actually access it in the required timeframe?
Hour 24-72: Recovery and Adaptation
Some aspects normalize while others remain disrupted. Participants must decide what constitutes "returning to normal operations" versus implementing permanent changes based on lessons learned.
Key question to force: At what point do you declare the incident resolved versus acknowledging a permanent shift in operational model?
Throughout each phase, the facilitator should inject "injects"—new information or complications that prevent participants from settling into comfortable patterns. According to a FEMA study on exercise design, "the value of a tabletop exercise correlates directly with the number of times participants are forced to reconsider their initial assumptions."
The Documentation Framework That Captures Real Gaps
Most tabletop exercises generate vague action items like "improve communication procedures." This is useless. Your documentation framework should capture three specific categories:
1. Decision Points With No Clear Owner
During the exercise, note every moment when participants debated who had authority to make a decision. These represent governance gaps. For each one, document:
- The specific decision that needed to be made
- Who participants thought should own it
- What information that owner would need
- How long the group spent debating before resolving it
Example: "At the 4-hour mark, participants spent 12 minutes debating whether Engineering or Finance had authority to implement emergency transaction limits. No written policy exists. Decision was eventually escalated to CEO, adding 30 minutes of latency."
2. Information That Didn't Exist or Wasn't Accessible
Track every request for data or analysis that revealed a gap. For each one, document:
- What information was requested
- Why it was deemed necessary
- Whether it theoretically exists somewhere
- The estimated time to actually access it in a crisis
Example: "Customer Success requested a list of all customers with >$100k monthly transaction volume denominated in affected currencies. This required combining data from three systems with no pre-existing integration. Estimated time to delivery: 6-8 hours."
3. Assumptions That Broke Under Scenario Stress
Document every moment when someone said "wait, I assumed…" These represent the mental models that will fail in a real crisis. For each one, document:
- The assumption that was stated
- Where it likely came from (documentation, convention, outdated policy)
- Why it doesn't hold under crisis conditions
- How many systems or procedures rely on this assumption
Example: "Participants assumed payment processor APIs would remain available even if settlement was delayed. Testing revealed three critical workflows that break entirely if API responses change format or timing, even without actual downtime."
The Post-Exercise Prioritization Framework
You will emerge from the exercise with more gaps than you can immediately address. The standard approach of prioritizing by "severity" or "likelihood" fails because depeg scenarios are by definition low-likelihood, high-severity events.
Instead, use a resilience-focused framework:
Tier 1: Gaps that prevent detection or assessment
If you can't identify that a crisis is developing or understand its scope, you cannot respond effectively to any scenario. Prioritize:
- Monitoring and alerting gaps
- Data access and analysis capabilities
- Communication channels that enable rapid assessment
These investments have positive ROI across all incident types, not just currency depegs.
Tier 2: Gaps that eliminate response options
These are failure modes where your only option becomes "wait and hope." They often involve hard dependencies on third parties or automated systems with no manual override. Prioritize:
- Single points of failure in critical paths
- Automated processes with no human intervention capability
- Third-party dependencies with no alternative or fallback
Tier 3: Gaps that slow response or increase cost
These gaps don't prevent response but make it more expensive or time-consuming. Address these after Tier 1 and 2:
- Inefficient approval processes
- Manual workarounds for automatable tasks
- Documentation or training deficiencies
The Federal Reserve's framework for critical infrastructure resilience emphasizes that "response optionality under stress" represents the key differentiator between organizations that recover quickly and those that experience sustained disruption.
Building Organizational Memory Beyond the Exercise
The exercise itself has a half-life. Without deliberate follow-through, organizational memory degrades quickly. Research from the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute found that "organizations lose 40% of crisis exercise learning within 90 days without structured knowledge capture."
Create durable artifacts:
The Depeg Runbook
Not a step-by-step procedure (which will be wrong anyway) but a decision tree that captures:
- Key decision points identified during the exercise
- Who owns each decision and what authority they have
- What information is needed for each decision
- Where to find that information
- Escalation paths when decisions can't be made at the appropriate level
The Assumptions Register
A living document that captures all embedded assumptions identified during the exercise:
- The assumption itself
- Where it exists in systems or procedures
- The conditions under which it breaks
- The impact if it breaks
- The mitigation if any
The Stakeholder Communication Templates
Pre-drafted communication templates for each phase of the crisis, addressing:
- Customers (by segment, as different segments have different concerns)
- Internal teams
- Board/investors
- Regulators if applicable
- Partners and vendors
These should be actual templates, not general guidelines. According to crisis communication research from the Institute for Public Relations, "time-to-first-communication correlates more strongly with reputation preservation than communication quality," meaning you must be able to communicate quickly even if imperfectly.
The Recurring Exercise Cadence That Maintains Readiness
A single tabletop exercise is not preparation—it's a snapshot. Your organization changes constantly: new team members, new systems, new dependencies, new customer segments. A 2023 Gartner study found that "organizations experience 40% turnover in crisis response personnel every 18 months," meaning institutional knowledge decays rapidly.
Establish a recurring exercise cadence:
Annually: Full cross-functional exercise with new scenario
This is your comprehensive stress test. Rotate scenario specifics (geographic focus, trigger event, affected systems) to prevent participants from pattern-matching to the previous exercise.
Quarterly: Functional deep-dives
Focus on specific teams or capabilities identified as gaps. Engineering might run a quarterly drill on implementing emergency transaction limits. Customer Success might drill on high-volume customer communication. These can be shorter and more tactical.
Monthly: Assumption validation
Review and test one assumption from your Assumptions Register. This doesn't require a full exercise—it might be as simple as having an engineer verify that a particular API failover mechanism actually works as documented.
This cadence ensures that preparation becomes part of organizational muscle memory rather than a one-time event.
What Success Actually Looks Like
You will not emerge from a well-run tabletop exercise feeling confident. If you do, the exercise was too easy. According to research on high-reliability organizations by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, effective preparation "increases awareness of vulnerability" rather than creating false confidence.
Success looks like:
- A documented list of gaps you didn't know existed
- Uncomfortable realizations about dependency fragility
- Debates that revealed differing assumptions about authority and process
- At least one "we would have made this decision wrong in a real crisis" moment
- Concrete action items with owners and timelines
- Increased respect among participants for the complexity of cross-functional crisis response
The goal is not to create a perfect plan—no plan survives contact with a real crisis. The goal is to build the organizational capacity to respond effectively to novel situations by:
- Clarifying decision rights before a crisis
- Identifying information gaps while you have time to address them
- Creating communication channels that work under stress
- Building shared mental models across functional silos
- Developing institutional memory about your vulnerabilities
Moving From Exercise to Resilience
A currency depeg or reset scenario may never materialize in the exact form you exercise. That's not the point. The operational resilience you build while preparing for a depeg scenario translates directly to other crisis types: payment processor outages, bank failures, regulatory changes, security incidents, or cascading third-party failures.
Organizations that invest in this type of preparation don't just weather individual crises better—they develop a systematic advantage in an increasingly volatile operating environment. According to a McKinsey study on enterprise resilience, "organizations with mature scenario planning capabilities recover from disruptions 2.5x faster and experience 40% less financial impact than peers."
For SaaS executives, the question isn't whether to run this exercise—it's whether you can afford to discover your gaps during an actual crisis rather than during a controlled simulation. The cost of the exercise is measured in days of leadership time. The cost of learning these lessons during a real event is measured in customer trust, revenue, and potentially the viability of your business.
Start with an honest assessment of your current readiness. Gather the cross-functional team. Design a scenario that feels uncomfortable. Embrace the gaps you discover. Your future self, managing an actual crisis, will be grateful for the preparation.
The financial system's complexity and interconnectedness continue to increase. The question isn't whether we'll see significant disruptions in the coming years—it's whether your organization will be among those that respond effectively or those that discover their vulnerabilities in real-time.