Financial Services · Platforms & Architecture
Articles in this selection, newest first. Change the filters, or clear them to see every article.
13 articles · Financial Services · Platforms & Architecture
Articles
Week of 19 October 2026
A lost zone is the failure banks plan for. Google’s London outage tested five layers of that plan
A power failure took down one zone of Google Cloud’s London region on 20 October 2026, the loss multi-zone banking systems are built to absorb. Services stalled anyway. Surviving a lost zone depends on five layers, and each has to be tested.
Week of 15 December 2025
Crypto trust charters and community banks: the binding decision sits in the core
The OCC’s conditional approval of five crypto trust banks gave smaller banks and credit unions credible custody partners. The harder problem drew less notice: how any of it would show up in the ledger, statements and reports their core systems produce.
Week of 20 October 2025
One region failed, many financial apps stalled: concentration risk sat in the dependencies
One Amazon Web Services region in Virginia faltered in October 2025, and financial apps that looked resilient on paper stalled anyway. The weak points were shared services and slow recoveries, so the answer is mapping dependencies and rehearsing degraded service, not reflexive multi-cloud.
Week of 8 September 2025
Why bank change control never saw the npm hijack
In September 2025, poisoned versions of widely used open-source code were live for about two hours. Bank change control was built to approve the code people write. This attack came in through code the build process fetched by itself, which nobody approves.
Week of 9 June 2025
Google Cloud’s June outage moved bank cloud diligence from uptime to change safety
Google Cloud’s June 2025 outage began with a routine policy update that reached every region at once. For banks, asking how a provider releases code and settings reveals far more than its promised uptime figure.
Week of 21 October 2024
Final and already in court: sorting open banking work by how much you would regret it
The CFPB’s open banking rule was final and in court on the same day. Banks could neither wait out the lawsuit nor build blindly, so the smart move was sorting the work by how much each piece would be regretted if the rule fell.
Week of 5 August 2024
How the August 2024 selloff found brokerages’ capacity limit before the first trade
As markets tumbled on August 5, 2024, customers of large retail brokerages struggled to log in and see balances. The strain sat before the first trade, in three layers with different owners: identity checks, account views and shared vendors. No rule set the target.
Week of 27 May 2024
Snowflake’s stolen logins put the contractor’s laptop inside the bank’s perimeter
The 2024 attacks on Snowflake customers broke nothing in the platform itself. They used passwords stolen from infected computers, often contractors’, and walked out with bulk data. Every step, from theft to login to extraction, was a lock the customer held.
Week of 17 July 2023
Why FedNow was a core-processor decision for community banks and credit unions
The Federal Reserve’s instant payment service went live in July 2023. For community banks and credit unions, joining depended on what their core processor could do in real time, all year round, and on fraud controls for payments that cannot be recalled.
Week of 22 February 2021
A few hours without Fedwire, and the bank promises with no fallback
Little lasting harm came of the Federal Reserve’s February 24, 2021 outage. It still revealed how few banks had mapped which customer promises rest on a single central payment rail, rehearsed the narrow manual alternatives, or planned for the backlog afterward.
Week of 25 January 2021
GameStop’s buy button was switched off in the clearinghouse
Retail brokers stopped customers buying GameStop on January 28, 2021, for reasons buried deep in clearing and settlement. The episode showed that a broker’s settlement exposure, its treasury playbook and its app work as one system, even though three different teams own them.
Week of 3 August 2020
Capital One’s cloud penalty was a verdict on sequencing
The $80 million penalty against Capital One judged a bank that moved critical systems faster than it could describe, test and watch the risks it was taking on. It passed no verdict on the cloud itself.
Week of 17 February 2020
Morgan Stanley and E*Trade: wealth scale is a client-data problem
Morgan Stanley’s deal for E*Trade, months after Schwab agreed to buy TD Ameritrade, was a bet on serving clients across do-it-yourself, advised and workplace channels. Whether that scale pays off depends on three layers of integration, and knowing the client comes first.