So, the question you are really asking is "to what extent are the other parties involved in the processing of payments resilient to AWS failure" – e.g. Stripe probably isn't and that's probably a decent chunk of e-commerce.
I definitely don't think this would be anything close to smooth sailing if AWS was to fully go down, but we do have the benefit that underlying payment infra is still dominated by on-prem with leased lines etc. My best guess of the actual behaviour would be that bank transfers would keep working, the card networks themselves would keep working but the average e-commerce website would not.
Naturally, we can only control for what we can control for – and for us the primary benefit of stand-in is what it gives us in the much more likely scenario of an incident in our platform.
I saw a whole corp POS platform a couple of decades ago that was hanging off a TFTP server on a machine that no one dared turn off in case the world ended. One day the DC UPS failed, it didn’t come back up and they had no retail operations for several hours while they sent a bunch of cash to a guy who had left to help them fix it.
There’s stuff like that everywhere lurking in the archaic.
I know of a modem in a DC which is used to talk to a branch office running AS400 hardware that is so old they have to buy spares off eBay.
My father worked as a banker for most of his life and when he was in his late twenties he got a position to oversee a smaller investment bank. This is sometime in the late 90s. When he started, he took a general look around, checked with everyone how things are going and happened to meet on of the few IT people working in the building. When the IT guy realized that he was speaking to a new person who might be able to change things around there, he was elated and told him that there was an issue the previous boss never took too urgently, even though it was quite critical. Apparently the servers that were running pretty much all of the transactions of that investment bank were located in the basement of that building and have literally never been migrated, upgraded or anything else. The servers that were left over from that time was literally one running machine and another machine that had died a few years prior that was now only used for spares in case anything on the singular still working machine broke. Since the hardware was so old, there apparently weren’t many replacement parts left and the ones that were left were incredibly expensive due to many bank depending on those specific servers.
Anyway, my father heard that story and immediately got the guy the funding he needed to migrate to a newer and better system. Sometimes I think about this kind of stuff, we think banks are really resilient (and they try to be), but I wouldn’t be surprised if setup like these still exist somewhere because people are too scared to touch them.
> Our functional typeface is Monzo Sans, a custom cut of Universal Sans, meaning it’s unique to Monzo. We chose it for maximum readability, with generous dots and curled ends.
Intersting choice, but I dig it :)
I suppose had they implemented a similar system, they would have degraded into a minimum viable banking system rather than the total outage that impacted so many brits.
Monzo were the first bank here to run entirely on the cloud, so I imagine the regulators were extra strict with them.
I'm not saying this level of resilience is due to that alone, but perhaps it started them on the path?
It's called "stand-in processing", and I assume it's the inspiration here.
It's clearly marketing at someone too stupid to be able to see right through how utterly useless that is. If you are celebrating getting your paycheck 1 day earlier (every time) then your financial literally and financial health are probably in the toilet. They _must_ know they are preying on people with statements like that.
Then again, 90% of Fintech seems to be just a heavy layer of lipstick over an archaic system. Often with very little care of if any of the tools actually help people and more of a focus on how flashy or how much people think they are being helped.
But most are, and unfortunately, as the proliferation of payday loans shows us, there is no shortage of desperate people and organizations willing to take advantage of that.
So the "post credit early" promise is not a gimmick, but the whole idea of being paid early is a gimmick. The next pay period is still a full period away, so any benefit to being credited early is literally a one-time, and probably just one-day thing.
https://monzo.com/blog/2019/08/20/monzo-now-lets-you-get-pai...
it's the sort of thing that could probably wipe out their capital completely in a black swan event
I would guess that payroll credits are the second most-reliable category in the ocean of ACH transactions, right after US Treasury payments.
How black would this swan need to be to blow up this stability?
Fair and that's all well and good. I'm just saying if 1-3 days delay of getting your paycheck is going to have a big impact on one's life then I encourage one to reexamine their decisions, something else is the problem.
