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Comment by Arbortheus | Hacker News Reader

Not all neobanks. I use Monzo, and they had an outage a while back. I was impressed that it barely affected their functionality.

They have a stand-in system that uses a separate codebase and separate cloud provider. They have a blog post about it here: https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.

(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)

I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

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Starling also has a disaster recovery system across cloud providers, although it is implemented differently to Monzo's (I used to work there on multi-cloud).

Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.

I have built these system for financial institutions since before cloud providers. It is hard/impossible if not well constrained at a level that supports data availability and consistency well (ie using a proper database with the correct setup across all locations with the underlying OS configuration/patches applied uniformly - the latter lesson cost IBM a lot of money due to system downtime for a financial institution that I brought back online). Many software vendors offering on-prem versions don’t know how this works well exactly, so I’ve had to help them along the journey and get them to sign-off for their contractual obligations to be upheld in the setup.

> the latter lesson cost IBM a lot of money due to system downtime for a financial institution that I brought back online

It sounds like that story could make a great blog post

TLDR: I was called in several hours after the downtime started. I architected and built the full system so I knew things were incredibly consistent and how every layer worked (each layer of the software/database, load balancers, the quirky legacy protocols, network setup, etc). IBM was saying it was an issue on the financial institution side, which I validated was not the case practically first (things were down so I was given freedom by the executive team to do as I needed). Since I sanity checked the easy parts first and had high confidence this was something much more wild after scanning through more stack traces than a human should, I decompiled and reverse engineered their code to show the IBM teams where the bug was in their switch statements triggered by the Redhat patch difference and its dependencies that triggered the edge case that stopped the highly available cluster setup from functioning. I created a script to override the system properties being read in on startup to trick the switch statement, show it worked, and got the system back online. IBM made an official hot patch that fixed the issue officially along with paying a lot of money back to the financial institution for their troubles (ie the double contractual obligations for the premium IBM support with included SLA clauses that were overrun and the proprietary IBM software itself).

> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.

I used to use Starling as my main and they were fine, until I started getting issues with random card declines due to "fraud prevention" and nobody to talk to. I switched to First Direct and like the peace of mind of having a human on the phone if needed (when I wanted to make a huge transfer for my house deposit it was nice to have!) and I still get perks like free foreign card transactions.

https://www.revolut.com/blog/post/revolut-is-officially-a-ba...

They are reigistered now

Yep, I probably won't bother switching to them now as Chase provides a good service as far as I know, though I do get a bit twitchy about its U.S. links. However, it's headquartered in the UK and is a division of J P Morgan Europe, so I hope that provides some level of distancing from the inevitable economic collapse of U.S. A.I. companies.

For what it's worth, JP Morgan specifically is probably the best positioned of all the major banks to endure any political and/or economic instability that might arise in the near-ish future. Not that this should necessarily drive your decision on who to bank with, but having spent the last decade or so working at various large US banks I have a lot of respect for the way JPMC operates

- The vast majority of their infra (at least as of ~3 years ago) is self-hosted in data centers that they own, and a lot of their other key cloud infra is/was multi-cloud (i.e. operations could fail over to GCP in the event of an AWS outage)

- Financially they have the healthiest balance sheet of any non-state-owned bank (like, in the entire world). Over the last ~20 years JPMC has acted as a sort of lender of last resort several times, most recently when they bought out First Republic.

- Politically, after navigating the aforementioned instability Jamie Dimon has almost carte blanche support from the shareholders, and everyone knows it. As a result, he can afford to be a lot less... compliant with the current US regime than other major players have been recently.

Thank you, this is great insider info. I only wish they had free checking accounts; they have all sorts of requirements in order to waive their monthly fee. Then I’d switch in a heartbeat because of your post.

In the UK, their current account is free of monthly charges.

> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

Help me understand, is the bad vibes you get from stories from the company culture? Or rather that the media put a target on their back (at at least in my opinion this is because they have a Russian born founder? Revolut is one of the best products I've ever used, I've honestly nothing but good things to say about them.

Its a great product when it works. When it doesn't, for example if they decide to freeze your money for no reason, it's not fun anymore. And there's plenty of reports of that happening to people.

You mean because they have automated AML/anti-fraud systems that all banks must have; every bank wrongly freezes accounts. To your mind, Revolut does that worse than others. I disagree, but without hard evidence, it's just our hunches at odds.

Yes, sure. But at my brick-and mortar bank I can go and talk to a flesh and bones human, instead of to an AI robot. Which is a much better service, when the anti-fraud thing does happen.

The revolut anti-fraud thing also seems to be less well done, being easier to trigger than other "real" banks.

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