Bank Transfers won't work on Saturday 2nd November from 6am-9am

Out of curiosity, what’s the impact and visibility like during the maintenance period?

Does the app gracefully let you know that transfers are currently unavailable due to maintenance?
Will it let you start a transfer, but then throw an error?
Will it start the transfer, but queue it up for after the maintenance period?

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Is it a requirement of Pay.uk to have a physical connection in a data centre using your hardware rather than it all being in AWS?

I think it would be good if the help article linked to the blog post where it said you were going to bring it in house etc.

It’ll show a (more eye-catching than the current notification) banner, that comes from our status page.

Unfortunately, yes. We didn’t pick up the app-side work in time to be able to make this experience nicer.
Until a few days ago there wasn’t an API call for “are faster payments turned on” (GET /faster-payments/outbound-payments-enabled :eyes:), and we didn’t get app changes done in time* to stop you from entering the payment flow if this returns false. As a band-aid we instead implemented a push notification if you try to send a payment during the maintenance that explains why.

* done in time to be released on both platforms to a meaningful adoption rate

No, it will reject the payment outright.

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I’m not sure I’d call it a requirement of pay.uk’s, but an implementation detail. The only way to talk to the central system as a directly connected participant is via dedicated fibre installed into datacentres. We already had DCs for connectivity to other schemes (the previous gateway provider, mastercard etc).

One of the pieces of feedback we gave as part of our input into the New Payments Architecture was that it should be at least possible to connect to it via the public internet, as this gives a huge leg up to smaller participants joining for the first time.

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I think I deep down knew this answer (though the push notification is a nice touch and makes things a bit clearer!)

Historically the error messages have left much to be desired when things go wrong but it just doesn’t tell you what, why, what I can do, who’s to blame (did I do something wrong, or an issue on Monzo’s side) etc.

So I was very much expecting in this case for it to throw an equally vague error!

While I think the push notifications is a good temporary solution for what is ultimately a couple hours of maintenance that is designed to have low impact. I am curious why you maybe didn’t wait for the apps - Was it just down to balancing the impact vs the time delay? Or is there a pressing need to get it out?

I’m also curious if there’s a plan to build in these sorts of feature-locks/error improvments for more things in the app moving forward for these eventualities (whether maintenance, incident management/mitigation, or otherwise)? (Though maybe this isn’t your area to answer!)

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There are only certain windows where we are able to perform this, as the migration requires 3 parties involved and there are other participants also looking to perform maintenance or onboard to the scheme. If we don’t do it this Saturday we have to wait 'til 2020 for the next window.

I can’t say for other parts of the app, but I do agree that our error messages for payments aren’t very graceful. My team has a bunch of fixes and things to tidy up on our backlog for after the gateway migration, so we hope to improve things like this.

This specific case is still useful for us to use during outages :crossed_fingers:, so we will be seeking to get app support for the new “payments disabled” API anyway.

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That’s actually really interesting! Are you able to expand on who and what their role is (Wouldn’t say I’m particularly familiar with all of the underlying third parties that make this stuff tick)

:grimacing: Right decision made then!

Super pleased to hear improvements are coming! Look forward to it

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It occurs to me that, elsewhere, someone was suggesting Monzo ought to be putting time into getting the ‘banking basics’ right.

I don’t think this fits their definition of the phrase (which was featured based) but it does fit mine.

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Love the transparency! Better than an outage for turning the clocks back

How are you building your infrastructure on-premeses, you use K8s in AWS, are you doing this on-prem? What are you running behind that to provide resiliency?

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I’ve come in late so this may have been asked, also my banking systems knowledge is limited so hope this is a sensible question:

If we were previously using someone else’s payment gateway, does this mean now that we have built our own we could start letting others us it? (for a little fee?)

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My guess is it’s:
PAY.UK themselves.
Existing gateway provider.
Monzo.

A combination of one turning off while the other turns on and pay uk overseeing the transition + things are ok on all ends.

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Prompted by the previous post about this on the Monzo blog I tried it out on our own kit earlier in the year

The ability of Go to create those completely standalone binaries is excellent. First time ever that none of our kit being online and/or not having package repositories was not an issue :slight_smile:

Thanks Monzo for the tip!

Isn’t that what Starling does, give or take?

  1. “The Scheme”: who we are migrating our direct connection to. They ultimately oversee our current connection to our gateway provider as well :slight_smile:
  2. Our current gateway provider: they’ll be watching as our scheme connection is routed away from them, and over to our new gateway (in our datacentres)
  3. Monzo - @nickrw and the rest of the payments team :stuck_out_tongue:

You need to book these maintenance windows quite far in advance, and as Nick mentioned, other banks also want to book in their maintenance; as well as unforeseen situations occurring.

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Will this help with international transfers or is it totally separate?

I’m curious what’s the difference between you bringing your FPS infrastructure in house and a clearing bank? I never quite understood.

Somewhat different concepts :slight_smile:

As a member of Faster Payments we can send and receive transactions for account numbers belonging to our assigned sortcodes. To do this we need to connect to the Faster Payments network. We have up until now connected via a third party gateway - they manage the somewhat more complex process of actually connecting to the national payments network, the special leased lines etc. We still have physical datacentres, but the process is a lot less involved for us.
We’re moving to our own in-house gateway so we’ll be connecting our gateway directly to the national network with all the additional complexity, rather than through the third party gateway which abstracted some of it away.

“Complexity” is quiet contextual here. It is not trivial to send and receive these transactions, even with a third party product :stuck_out_tongue:

“Clearing bank” also depends on the context you use it in. We are direct members of Faster Payments - this means we settle with the Scheme at the Bank of England and, as Faster Payments is net settlement, at the prescribed times rather than instantaneously.
You can also use the term in relation to SWIFT, Bacs or any other “money moving” network :slight_smile:

I hope that helps :slight_smile:

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Really interesting - thanks for the detailed response.

I’m even more curious about other things now. If this applies to FPS only, does it mean that a third party handles BACS, DD and other things like that for now until it’s brought in house?

Bacs is entirely separate and processed via a different system - it is file based and like Mastercard clearing, is handled in bulk batches :slight_smile: We are not direct Participants of Bacs.

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