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Called Monzo Stand-in, the replica platform enables customers to make payments, withdraw cash, freeze their card and send and receive bank transfers even if the main Monzo app goes down.

Outages in the banking industry have become a pressing concern for regulators and politicians as more customers move online.

Recent figures from the UK Government Treasury Committee revealed that nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours – the equivalent of more than 33 days – of tech outages in the last two years.

During a recent three-day outage at Barclays, 56% of online payments failed due to ‘severe degradation’ of its mainframe processing performance. The bank confirms it expects to pay between £5 million and £7.5 million in compensation to customers for ‘inconvenience or distress’.

In February British banks TSB, Bank of Scotland, Nationwide Building Society, Halifax, Lloyds and First Direct all reported problems for ingoing and outgoing payments.

Monzo Stand-in is an independent set of systems that run on Google Cloud Platform and is able to take over from the bank’s Primary Platform, which runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the event of a major incident. It supports the most important features of Monzo like spending on cards, withdrawing cash, sending and receiving bank transfers, checking account balances and transactions, and freezing or unfreezing cards.

From: Monzo develops backup bank to cover outages.

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The life of most people in 1800 was no better, and in some demonstrable measures worse, than that of a hunter-gatherer in 100,000 bc. Malthus has had a terrible press for predicting that material progress would always cause a surge in population that wiped out any advantages brought by the improvements. Susskind, however, argues that Malthus was broadly correct. As Paul Krugman has written, ‘he was right about roughly 58 out of 60 centuries of civilisation … the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.’

From: John Lanchester · Short Cuts: Labour’s Straitjacket.

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the UK economy has a persistent problem with productivity which nobody understands and nobody knows how to fix

From: John Lanchester · Short Cuts: Labour’s Straitjacket.

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The life of most people in 1800 was no better, and in some demonstrable measures worse, than that of a hunter-gatherer in 100,000 bc. Malthus has had a terrible press for predicting that material progress would always cause a surge in population that wiped out any advantages brought by the improvements. Susskind, however, argues that Malthus was broadly correct. As Paul Krugman has written, ‘he was right about roughly 58 out of 60 centuries of civilisation … the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.’

From: John Lanchester · Short Cuts: Labour’s Straitjacket.

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Thirty per cent of Gen Z — those aged between 18 and 27 — began investing in capital markets at university age compared with 15 per cent of millennials, and 5 per cent of baby boomers, according to the poll, which surveyed 13,000 people across 13 countries, including the US, UK, Brazil, China and India.

Experts say investing has become increasingly popular among young people, driven by the emergence of mobile apps that charge little to no commission and the abundance of financial content available online. In the UK, 64 per cent of Gen Z investors review and adjust portfolios at least once a month compared with only 34 per cent of baby boomers, the WEF found.

However, policymakers and regulators worry that too many are making their first foray into investing through cryptocurrencies. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said on Tuesday that there were “several million” under-35s in the country whose first investment was in crypto, despite the “very high risk that you could lose all your money”.

From: A third of Gen Z invest by ‘early adulthood’, poll finds.

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Digital wallets for initiating and receiving real-time A2A payments are the future of the payments industry and how we pay across the world.

From: (4) What’s Going On – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.

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Young people are much more likely than older generations to deploy artificial intelligence tools to help them invest. An Opinium survey of UK investors for Fidelity International last month found only 1 per cent of boomers reported that an AI assistant influenced their financial decisions in the past two years, compared with 21 per cent of Gen Z.

From: A third of Gen Z invest by ‘early adulthood’, poll finds.

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However, policymakers and regulators worry that too many are making their first foray into investing through cryptocurrencies. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said on Tuesday that there were “several million” under-35s in the country whose first investment was in crypto, despite the “very high risk that you could lose all your money”.

From: A third of Gen Z invest by ‘early adulthood’, poll finds.

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In his 2025 annual letter to investors, Blackrock chairman and CEO Larry Fink wrote that “If we’re serious about building an efficient and accessible financial system, championing tokenization alone won’t suffice. We must solve digital verification, too.”

JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in this year’s annual letter to his shareholders that consumer payments have become a “new battleground” for banks, driven by third parties who want access to banks’ customer data.

He says this all the time, actually. Back in 2021 he said that competition will be particularly tight in the world of payments and that “I expect to see very, very tough, brutal competition in the next 10 years”. The reason that he singled out payments as a specific hill for banks to die on is because future business models depend on data and payments account for the overwhelming majority of interactions between a bank and its customers and therefore generate most customer data. He knew that the techfins interest in payments isn’t really about the money, because the margins on payments are going down, but about the data.