6 ms·

This kind of thing gives me confidence in "challenger banks" like Monzo who are building their systems in-house and I hope with a lot more testing than this. A

This kind of thing gives me confidence in "challenger banks" like Monzo who are building their systems in-house and I hope with a lot more testing than this. As far as I know Monzo is using microservices (a bank is probably big enough for that to be the right choice) to try and limit the damage of anything insane like this. The way they handled Prepaid to Current Accounts was absolutely seamless https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/05/how-monzo-to-monzo-payments-work/ https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/05/how-monzo-to-monzo-payment...

tachion 8y ago
This has nothing to do with microservices and everything to do with lack of skill, proper engineering and chaos in IT departments of almost all banks. You can write and deploy (don't forget about the fact developers aren't skilled in ops at all and that's a common cause for these things) good software in microservices and monolith architectures, you just need to know what are you doing. Monzo/Mondo had issues on their own, and in fact they have very frequent issues with their payment processors.
- philcrump 8y ago
  They had very frequent issues with their payment processors. The current account (now the only account as the prepaid beta programme has ended) runs on their internally developed payment processor, and has so far had minimal issues. More information here: https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/04/ending-prepaid/ https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/04/ending-prepaid/
gaius 8y ago
You know “microservices” was invented by IBM in the 1960s on mainframes, right?
djhworld 8y ago
Starling bank do this too, and have more features than Monzo
leejo 8y ago
> This kind of thing gives me confidence in "challenger banks" like Monzo who are building their systems in-house and I hope with a lot more testing than this. I know someone who interviewed at Monzo and said the interview process and technical test (write a web crawler in Go) was generally a pretty good process. However they "noped!" out of there when the interviewer said that they don't do unit/automated testing, and it's the developer's responsibility to make sure their code works. This was a while ago, so hopefully things have changed or hopefully the interviewer was not telling the truth (perhaps looking for a reaction?). However if it is the case then they're about as "modern" a bank as all the rest of these legacy banks, or at least will be in a few years time when their technical debt starts to catch up with them.
- kennydude 8y ago
  TIL... That is concerning
  - leejo 8y ago
    It is at odds with some of the blogs they have been posting[1], but those seem to focus on more of the frontend / app side of things. Having worked for a PSP and integrated with several of the big UK banks, I really really really hope they are actually covering the backend side as well. [1] https://monzo.com/blog/2016/04/26/automated-testing/ https://monzo.com/blog/2016/04/26/automated-testing/

tachion 8y ago

This has nothing to do with microservices and everything to do with lack of skill, proper engineering and chaos in IT departments of almost all banks. You can write and deploy (don't forget about the fact developers aren't skilled in ops at all and that's a common cause for these things) good software in microservices and monolith architectures, you just need to know what are you doing. Monzo/Mondo had issues on their own, and in fact they have very frequent issues with their payment processors.

philcrump 8y ago
They had very frequent issues with their payment processors. The current account (now the only account as the prepaid beta programme has ended) runs on their internally developed payment processor, and has so far had minimal issues. More information here: https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/04/ending-prepaid/ https://monzo.com/blog/2018/04/04/ending-prepaid/

gaius 8y ago

You know “microservices” was invented by IBM in the 1960s on mainframes, right?

djhworld 8y ago

Starling bank do this too, and have more features than Monzo

leejo 8y ago

> This kind of thing gives me confidence in "challenger banks" like Monzo who are building their systems in-house and I hope with a lot more testing than this. I know someone who interviewed at Monzo and said the interview process and technical test (write a web crawler in Go) was generally a pretty good process. However they "noped!" out of there when the interviewer said that they don't do unit/automated testing, and it's the developer's responsibility to make sure their code works. This was a while ago, so hopefully things have changed or hopefully the interviewer was not telling the truth (perhaps looking for a reaction?). However if it is the case then they're about as "modern" a bank as all the rest of these legacy banks, or at least will be in a few years time when their technical debt starts to catch up with them.

kennydude 8y ago
TIL... That is concerning
- leejo 8y ago
  It is at odds with some of the blogs they have been posting[1], but those seem to focus on more of the frontend / app side of things. Having worked for a PSP and integrated with several of the big UK banks, I really really really hope they are actually covering the backend side as well. [1] https://monzo.com/blog/2016/04/26/automated-testing/ https://monzo.com/blog/2016/04/26/automated-testing/