Monzo's new "last resort" for payments could have saved Barclays' blushes
Earlier this month, a technical issue caused thousands of customers at Barclays to be locked out of their accounts and unable to process payments. Monzo, presumably looking to avoid being put in a similar situation, has unveiled a new project protecting itself from outages.
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In a blog post yesterday, the fintech banking giant lifted the veil on Monzo Stand-In, a "completely separate backup banking infrastructure" using a different cloud provider, serving as a "last resort" in the case of cloud failure.
Monzo says its primary platform runs on AWS, but Stand-In operates on Google Cloud. Should Monzo switch to Stand-In, customers are still able to use cards, send and receive bank transfers and check account balances. Only 18 of Monzo's ~3,000 services are available via stand-in, but those mentioned are the ones customers were most frequently complaining about during Barclays' outage. It operates at ~1% of the cost of Monzo's primary platform.
Stand-In doesn't just accommodate for AWS' potential failings. Monzo says the system can be used when "a bug in our code or processes is the cause for an outage."
The blog says that the need for a completely alternate system is because "disaster recovery hasn’t really evolved," outside of hardware failure prevention. Monzo says "it doesn’t matter how many data centres you have if you run the same software in them all."
The fintech already implemented Stand-In last August, when Monzo suffered a 1-hour outage. Daniel Chatfield, a principal engineer in the "small team" that built it, says Monzo can "shift all payment processing in 15 seconds" to Stand-In. The fintech calls the project a "huge success."
Implementing that kind of system might be easier said than done at Barclays, which is still inundated with legacy systems like most banks. 75% of the bank's workload was on the cloud as of February 2023, so there's presumably a long way to go until its 100%. At the least, Monzo's system acts as a proof-of-concept while Barclays' mishap acts more as a cautionary tale.
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