TWO BANKS ONE APP.

If you're a Monzo customer, you might not have noticed that they had a moment yesterday. Many people wouldn't have even realized. So just after 3:00 PM in the UK, the app started showing some error messages. And Down Detector, which is a website that reports when things are down, that blew up thousands of reports in minutes. If you'd have opened the app, you'd have seen a message saying that it wasn't fully working. So what was actually going on? Monzo's got this thing called a stand-in. And it's basically a second completely separate bank that runs in parallel. It's built specifically so it never depends on the main one. Platform runs on AWS, Amazon Web Services. But stand-in runs entirely on Google Cloud or GCP. Different provider, different infrastructure. So if one falls over, the other one doesn't fall down with it. And the app's checking in the background for whether stand-in and when it does, you get a stripped back version of the app. You lose a few of the bells and whistles, the nice to haves. But the stuff that actually matters on your card, the sending money, your balance, checking your balance, all of that, it keeps working. And that's exactly what happened yesterday. Monzo flipped. They fixed whatever had gone wrong. Switched everyone. And the whole time customers could still bank. If you compare that to the rest of UK banking, the Treasury Committee found that nine major banks and building societies racked up over 803 hours of outages between them in the last two years. That's over a month combined of people locked out of their banks. Barclays had a three-day outage on its own. Broke 56% of online payments facing costs pushing close to seven and a half million pounds? And this isn't the first time that stand-in's been used. Monzo built it exactly for this scenario. Kicked in more, including a real incident back in August 2000... 2024. Look, I'm not saying that Monzo's untouchable. I don't bank with this isn't a paid-for listing or an ad. But everything breaks eventually, right? I get that. But what matters in the moments when it breaks, most banks just leave you stuck with nothing to fall back on. But Monzo built an entire second bank on a second cloud provider that moment. That's a level of resilience. Regulation is trying to push the whole industry towards. But most of the banks, they're not anywhere near it.