Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS Bonus: How Monzo stays online when everyone else goes down - with CTO Matej Pfajfar
May 28, 2025
Matej Pfajfar, Group CTO at Monzo Bank and former Google Android developer, discusses the unseen challenges of banking outages. He explains how Monzo’s innovative Monzo Stand-In solution keeps services available even during failures. The conversation dives into the engineering strategies essential for operational continuity and customer security. Matej also emphasizes Monzo's unique culture that fosters resilience and collaboration, ensuring they stay ahead in an increasingly tumultuous landscape.
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Understanding Bank Outages
- An outage in banking means a systemic failure affecting all or part of the services available to customers.
- Incidents precede outages and are anomalous system conditions that may or may not result in outages depending on response speed.
Monzo's Uptime Excellence
- Monzo achieves 99.995% availability for critical services like payments.
- This translates to about 20 minutes of downtime per year, indicating extremely high reliability.
Prioritize Uptime and Security
- Keeping a digital bank operational and secure are the CTO’s top priorities.
- Constant vigilance and 24/7 on-call teams are essential for rapid incident response.