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Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

What I think is fascinating is not just that we applaud Monzo for this, but that we allow other important services that control our lives to get away with revealing nothing about what happened or what they've changed to prevent it. Can you imagine any large bank (for the US, say JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, etc.) putting out a note with this level of transparency, accountability, and clear direction to change?

For more about what makes a good apology, see https://withoutbullshit.com/?s=apology&submit=Search by Josh Bernoff, a former Forrester editor and a very direct writer.

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In the UK they do have to: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/fca-mandated-and-voluntary-info...

I can't imagine one of those giant banks having this kind of outage.

Fast Payments break between EU banks all the time.

It happens all the time, and they just don't tell you. We get automated notices when banks connect and disconnect from the Faster Payments network, something happens every few days. Not always this length, but occasionally.

Just yesterday a major high street bank stopped sending payments for an hour, and was telling customers on Twitter that there were no problems.

Hell, the central system (what I called the Hub in this article) had a 12 hour split brain meltdown last July which had banks emailing each other spreadsheets back and forth for two weeks afterwards.

Who manages the 'hub'?

Faster Payments is managed by Pay.UK who contract the infrastructure to VocaLink (which is 93% owned by MasterCard).

Pay.UK are currently holding a procurement exercise to find a new operator for Faster Payments http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/infrastructure-renewal

Emailing each other spreadsheets for two weeks is nothing! Try a year of it combined with angry telephone phone calls between various 'heads'.

Good write-up and very lucid writing to a wide audience. As a new Monzo customer, the customer service I've received has been excellent and far exceeding any service - in retail banking - from a legacy bank that I've had, just to pop that in.

Various banking (sub)systems break all the time. We just never get any postmortems or public apologies.

This reminds me the saying "Never admit a wrongdoing and you'll never be wrong".

It's great that we get several of those new startup banks (Monzo, N26 etc.) that provide superior experience and slowly show what horrible things traditional banks were getting away with.

Some months ago I transferred some money between two accounts at different banks. The money arrived _twice_ in two different accounts of mine at the destination bank. I contacted them and asked them to cancel the second transfer, but they just told me it would get automatically denied for insufficient funds at the origin. They also warned me that if it happened again my account might have restrictions placed on it.

An apology would have been nice, but I suppose unwarranted threats are more in character.

Google TSB / Banc Sabadell

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