Two weeks ago a Google Cloud outage took down Revolut services, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers temporarily unable to access their money or make card transactions.
The incident capped a tumultuous couple of months for the UK fintech, which also disclosed two separate data security incidents involving Revolut customers in September.
Between 4-5 September unauthorised access to US broker-dealer DriveWealth’s network exposed historical data connected to Revolut customers. A week later, Revolut disclosed that a hacker gained access to a government agency’s systems and used it to send fraudulent requests for information to Revolut.
The incidents sharpened a long-standing concern about the fintech sector’s dependence on an interconnected web of financial infrastructure and service providers at a time when UK regulators already have concerns about cloud concentration risk and operational resilience.
(Last year the Bank of England warned banks that "we expect [operational resilience] to become a major consideration in their investment programmes. Designing services to be resilient is often easier than reverse engineering resilience into fragile services.")
“The UK has a particularly well-developed regulatory framework for financial services, and institutions invest significantly in security and technology,” said Dr Igor Kotsiuba, assistant professor in finance at Durham University Business School. “Yet disruptions can still occur, even when organisations rely on leading global technology providers.”
