Vendor Risk and Business Continuity Separate Silos

A bank gets a call early, before most employees are at their desks. A payment processor is experiencing minor service degradation. Transaction times are running a little longer than usual, but it's nothing critical, and the vendor says they're working on it.

By mid-morning, the institution's digital banking platform is rejecting payments because a short timeout window can't tell the difference between a slow transaction and a failed one. The call center says the wait time climb is well past normal. The fraud detection system, tuned for typical timing, starts flagging delayed payments and blocking good customers. The core processor's nightly reconciliation generates a wave of exceptions that someone now must research by hand.

A minor vendor degradation just became an institution-wide operational event. The latest article from IntraFi explores how this happens and what banks can do to close the gap