@robinson-wall Nice writeup, definitely raises the standards in the banking industry! I have a few questions:
1. Was this post-mortem part of an official process or something of an individual initiative? I saw it published on the blog, but it might be helpful to have this information disambiguated from marketing material on a separate site: https://status.cloud.google.com/summary
2. I'm not sure how payment processors work, but would having multiple payment processors from Monzo's interface make sense from a cost/benefit perspective?
3. Any plans to expand to the U.S. anytime soon, or recommend any banks that follow Monzo's best practices? ;-)
1. A mix of both, we have a culture of being transparent by default - it's one of the first things that attracted me to come and work here. I was the incident lead for this on the day, and volunteered to write up this post-mortem. I did have help from colleagues in the marketing team to try and make this as accessible as possible.
As another poster mentioned we already have a status page where we post about incidents as they happen (though obviously not in quite as much detail as here). Personally I think our main blog is a reasonable place to have this ️.
2. Multiple redundant payment processors would be great, but ultimately infeasible. As a settling FPS participant we have to have a single Bank of England settlement account, tied 1:1 to a "bank code". Multiple sort codes map to a single bank code, and migrating sort codes between bank codes is non-trivial.
It'd be great if we could migrate sort codes easily between redundant connections, but as we build our own Gateway we'll have complete control over how our failover mechanisms work. Here's to much greater uptime in the future!
3. As another commenter mentioned - yes! We're just doing staff testing for now, but we've got a waiting list up. It'll be a prepaid product issued by another bank before we get a US banking license, just like we were in the UK a couple of years ago.
1. Was this post-mortem part of an official process or something of an individual initiative? I saw it published on the blog, but it might be helpful to have this information disambiguated from marketing material on a separate site: https://status.cloud.google.com/summary
2. I'm not sure how payment processors work, but would having multiple payment processors from Monzo's interface make sense from a cost/benefit perspective?
3. Any plans to expand to the U.S. anytime soon, or recommend any banks that follow Monzo's best practices? ;-)