Instrument for auditors
Capture who acknowledged alerts and when mitigations occurred. Store this alongside the monitor output for auditability and postmortems.
Log every status page update, change control approval, and rollback decision. Auditors want proof that you followed policy under pressure.
Segment access: responders can mitigate, but only specific roles can close incidents or change customer messaging.
Protect critical flows
Prioritize ACH, card processing, KYC, and ledger writes with separate SLOs. Tie alerts to customer and regulator impact, not just service names.
Use multi-region failover with tested runbooks and pre-staged approvals. Simulate partial outages where one payment rail slows while others stay healthy.
Encrypt secrets, rotate keys, and monitor certificate expiry aggressively; expired TLS on banking endpoints is an avoidable incident.
Compliance signals
- Access-controlled runbooks with version history
- Immutable incident timelines and chat exports
- Monthly SLA exports with supporting evidence
Communicate conservatively
Provide clear customer impact statements without exposing sensitive detail. Say which payment methods, geos, and institutions are affected and how you're containing risk.
Share expected settlement timelines in updates and whether retries are safe. Flag any manual reconciliation steps customers might need.
After recovery, attach a plain-language summary for customer success and compliance so they can answer bank partner questions quickly.
Prove and improve
Run quarterly tabletop exercises with finance and legal present. Record how quickly you can gather evidence, publish compliant updates, and switch to backup processors.
Track false positives and near-misses; refine monitors so they stay useful without burning people out during audits.