Comment by Arbortheus

17 hours ago

Not all neobanks. I use Monzo, and they had an outage a while back. I was impressed that it barely affected their functionality.

They have a stand-in system that uses a separate codebase and separate cloud provider. They have a blog post about it here: https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.

(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)

I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

13 comments

Arbortheus

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m11a  16 hours ago

Starling also has a disaster recovery system across cloud providers, although it is implemented differently to Monzo's (I used to work there on multi-cloud).

Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.

  • rancar2  15 hours ago

    I have built these system for financial institutions since before cloud providers. It is hard/impossible if not well constrained at a level that supports data availability and consistency well (ie using a proper database with the correct setup across all locations with the underlying OS configuration/patches applied uniformly - the latter lesson cost IBM a lot of money due to system downtime for a financial institution that I brought back online). Many software vendors offering on-prem versions don’t know how this works well exactly, so I’ve had to help them along the journey and get them to sign-off for their contractual obligations to be upheld in the setup.

    • dgrcode  12 hours ago

      > the latter lesson cost IBM a lot of money due to system downtime for a financial institution that I brought back online

      It sounds like that story could make a great blog post

      1 reply →

fumblebee  12 hours ago

> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

Help me understand, is the bad vibes you get from stories from the company culture? Or rather that the media put a target on their back (at at least in my opinion this is because they have a Russian born founder? Revolut is one of the best products I've ever used, I've honestly nothing but good things to say about them.

  • Doohickey-d  10 hours ago

    Its a great product when it works. When it doesn't, for example if they decide to freeze your money for no reason, it's not fun anymore. And there's plenty of reports of that happening to people.

ndsipa_pomu  17 hours ago

> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.

  • misstuned  16 hours ago

    I used to use Starling as my main and they were fine, until I started getting issues with random card declines due to "fraud prevention" and nobody to talk to. I switched to First Direct and like the peace of mind of having a human on the phone if needed (when I wanted to make a huge transfer for my house deposit it was nice to have!) and I still get perks like free foreign card transactions.