S.A.F.E.R. – Secure | Available | Fast | Efficient | Recoverable
A framework for digital resilience in the financial technology sector.
From mass payment outages to phishing campaigns following cyber breaches, the fintech sector is under increasing pressure to prove not just its innovation, but its resilience. The latest headlines in 2025 alone tell a story of fragility across the financial technology ecosystem.
S = Secure
Beware phony IT calls after Co-op and M&S hacks, says UK cyber centre
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns of an increase in fraudulent IT calls following ransomware attacks. Attackers pose as internal IT staff to gain access. Fintech firms must bolster employee awareness and internal incident response to defend against these evolving threats from social engineering tactics to ransomware and supply chain vulnerabilities. The rise in phishing and impersonation attacks after the high profile breaches like those at Co-op and M&S proves that basic defences are no longer enough.
Pipe Ten can advise on:
- Threat Detection and Vulnerability Management to identify, assess, and mitigate security weaknesses in software, systems, and networks to prevent cyberattacks and data breaches by addressing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
- Security Awareness Training to educate your teams to learn to recognise phishing attempts and impersonation scams.
- Zero Trust Architecture Guidance delivered by our consultants help fintech organisations design systems where trust is never assumed.
- SIEM Integration & Threat Monitoring centralises security data from various sources, analyses it for suspicious patterns, and alerts to potential threats or incidents, which allows for better visibility, faster detection, and more effective responses to security threats.
A = Available
Pay day banking outages hit 1.2m people, banks reveal
A technical issue at a third-party provider disrupted salary payments across HSBC, Santander, Lloyds, and Nationwide caused about 1.2 million customers to fail to receive their money on time due to a technical issue with a third-party service. This outage demonstrates the need for Fintechs to build availability into their systems and account for upstream risk.
Pipe Ten can advise on:
- High Availability Hosting & Failover Design to architect redundant infrastructure tailored for transaction-heavy environments.
- Resilience Testing to simulate provider or API outages to test your stack’s ability to degrade gracefully.
- Dependency Mapping & SLA Review to identify hidden upstream risks and ensure providers meet fintech-grade service expectations.
- Cloud & Hybrid Strategy Consulting to avoid vendor lock-in and increase resilience through multi-region and multi-cloud deployments.
F = Fast
UK to implement T+1 settlement by 2027
The UK will adopt a next-day (T+1) settlement cycle by 11 October 2027 to increase market speed and reduce counterparty risk. Faster settlements are critical for fintechs involved in trading and digital asset processing.
Pipe Ten can advise on:
- Performance Optimisation Audits from Database tuning, caching strategies, and application profiling to achieve maximum speed.
- Scalable Infrastructure using elastic systems that respond to load surges without lag which are ideal for high-frequency processing.
- CI/CD Pipelines to build, test and deploy at speed though automation that doesn’t compromise on governance or safety.
- Latency Analysis & CDN Configuration to deliver low-latency services globally, with intelligent routing and caching.
E = Efficient
UK Finance: AI Spend to Hit Record Levels in 2025
FinTech Magazine, January 2025
Financial institutions are planning to allocate 16% of tech budgets to AI in 2025, up from 12%, focusing on automation and cost control. Institutions planning to increase investment to 16% of technology budgets by 2025, up from 12% this year. For fintechs, efficiency is about scaling intelligently while keeping overhead low.
Pipe Ten can advise on:
- Cloud Cost Reviews to slash wasteful cloud bills with usage audits and smarter allocation of resources.
- Automation & Orchestration reviews from backup routines to scaling policies, we automate the labour out of operations.
- Platform Engineering support in creating self-service developer platforms that reduce internal friction and speed up delivery.
- Containerisation & Orchestration to manage and deploy containers of packaged applications across multiple servers or environments.
R = Recoverable
Beyond Disaster Recovery: Building Payment Resilience in an Uncertain World
55% of organisations experienced outages from 2021 to 2023, with 16% costing over $1 million. Payment systems are often overlooked in DR planning. Traditional disaster recovery plans often treat payment systems as an afterthought. Resilient fintechs address both IT and payment infrastructure recovery in their strategies.
Pipe Ten can advise on:
- Disaster Recovery Design & Testing for full failover solutions that can be tested regularly with recovery time objectives.
- Business Continuity Planning from communication flows to third-party dependencies and modelling real crisis scenarios.
- Immutable Backup Strategies implementing ransomware resilient, offsite backup to protect mission-critical data.
- Incident Response Playbooks for practical, tested response workflows tailored to your platform, people and regulatory obligations.
In summary, cyber attackers are exploiting confusion after breaches at Co-op and M&S, impersonating IT teams to gain internal access. Banking outages have delayed paydays for over a million UK workers, caused by faults at third-party providers. Settlement speeds are accelerating, with the UK’s shift to T+1 trading cycles demanding faster, more reliable infrastructure. AI investment is soaring, as institutions require automation to control costs and scale efficiently and disaster recovery shortcomings are being exposed, with more than half of organisations reporting damaging outages in recent years.
In response, Pipe Ten applies its S.A.F.E.R. framework pillars of Secure, Available, Fast, Efficient, and Recoverable to guide fintech organisations towards robust, compliant, and future-ready platforms. Each pillar addresses a critical dimension of resilience, shaped by real threats and informed by years of experience in secure hosting and consultancy for regulated industries.