Resiliency and transparency in the digital age

Back in August last year I published an article suggesting we might be entering a new age of service transparency due to the openness of both Monzo and AWS in being very transparent with regards to the causes of headline hitting outages they had suffered, as well as communicating honestly with customers during and after the outage (original article here).

Recently we’ve seen another flurry of headline hitting outages impacting financial services in Europe; first of all, TSB’s outage caused by the migration of its core-banking systems from Lloyds Banking Group to Sabadell’s Proteo.  The outage started at the end of April, impacted over 1.9million customers, continued intermitently for a number of weeks, and led to payment problems, incorrect funds being credited and claims that some customers were seeing other customers details instead of their own.  

Then this weekend the outage Visa suffered on Friday across Europe has been on the front pages of many of Saturdays papers.  Whilst Visa were quick to advise once service had been restored that the outage wasn’t the result of any unauthorised access or cyber-attack but was instead the result of “a hardware failure”.

Certainly, the transparency between the organisations and the end consumer of the above disruptions fell short of what many expect in this digital age; more worrying though is the apparent lack of organisational and technical resiliency to be able to ensure service continued despite issues.  TSB suffered from very confused communication throughout the outage, with Visa merely saying they were suffering some disruption and then explaining it away on a hardware failure over 12 hours later.

In the age of consumers relying less on cash and more and more on contactless, chip and pin as well as smart devices to make payments, a large outage like Visa’s is a massive blow to the confidence of being able to live in a cashless society.   And as we enter an age where, certainly in the UK the account switching service is making it easier to move Banks, an outage that knocks the consumers confidence in their bank will see them looking to switch; time will tell how many TSB customers decide to move.

From both outages we can take away two things; firstly, there must be tried and tested resiliency in the services that we deliver.  It could be argued that this has always been the case, but in the age we all now live and work, consumers expect digital services to be available at all times.  Organisations must test changes fully to ensure that their introduction doesn’t cause issues for consumers, as well as ensuring that there are resiliency and continuity plans in places for when issues happen.  In both the cases above, it appears that either testing wasn’t sufficient (in the TSB case), or that sufficient resiliency wasn’t in place (for Visa where a hardware failure can take out processing for Europe).   Secondly, honest and transparent communication with customers is so important; both in admitting that there is a service issue, as well as sharing what caused the issue and the steps you will take to ensure it doesn’t re-occur.