Engineers at Monzo have developed a fully independent backup bank — covering data, software, and infrastructure — which can be instantly activated during outages.
Called Monzo Stand-in, the replica platform enables customers to make payments, withdraw cash, freeze their card and send and receive bank transfers even if the main Monzo app goes down.
Outages in the banking industry have bceome a pressing concern for regulators and politicians as more customers move online.
Recent figures from the UK Government Treasury Committee revealed that nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours - the equivalent of more than 33 days - of tech outages in the last two years.
During a recent three-day outage at Barclays, 56% of online payments failed due to ‘severe degradation’ of its mainframe processing performance. The bank confirms it expects to pay between £5 million and £7.5 million in compensation to customers for ‘inconvenience or distress’.
In February British banks TSB, Bank of Scotland, Nationwide Building Society, Halifax, Lloyds and First Direct all reported problems for ingoing and outgoing payments.
Monzo Stand-in is an independent set of systems that run on Google Cloud Platform and is able to take over from the bank's Primary Platform, which runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the event of a major incident. It supports the most important features of Monzo like spending on cards, withdrawing cash, sending and receiving bank transfers, checking account balances and transactions, and freezing or unfreezing cards.
The Monzo App checks whether Monzo Stand-in is enabled periodically in the background, and if it is, it flips to a simplified UI that supports the bank's most important features.
"With Stand-in, we can continue to provide critical services to customers in the event of a severe platform outage - something that we are seeing more and more across the banking industry," says a Monzo spokesperson. "You will have seen recently the impact that outages can have on customers - especially when they are unable to carry out essential banking. To our knowledge we are the only bank that offers something like this."
The Stand-in platform had it first major outing in August 2024 when Monzo suffered a major platform incident that impacted most of its systems, including it ability to process payments and to serve the Monzo App.
States the bank: "The outage itself lasted for approximately one hour, but we enabled Monzo Stand-in very shortly after detecting a problem to make sure our customers could still use their money."