7. Banking, finance, and financial continuity

Two days after the Shock, the CTO declared the infrastructure stabilized. Core services were limping along on a regional provider. Customer data had been restored from offline backups. For the first time, the leadership team exhaled.

But the panic was still real in the finance departement. Six months earlier, the CFO had moved the company's operating cash to a neobank, with the kind with a beautiful dashboard, instant notifications, and an API that plugged directly into the accounting stack. The company had left their long-time banking partner, a mid-sized French institution with a branch around the corner. The fees were higher, the interface was from another era. It had felt like a sensible modernization. Now the neobank's app displayed a loading screen. No error message. No degraded mode. Just silence. Customer support was chat-only, and the chat was unreachable. There was no branch to walk into. 

And there was another problem: most of the company's working capital was not even in that account. The CFO had parked the bulk of the treasury in short-term deposits and US Treasury notes, denominated in dollars. It had been the sound, conservative choice — safe, liquid, yielding. But the same sanctions that had disrupted cloud access were now freezing dollar-denominated assets held by European entities.

The company was technically alive. Its product was recovering. Its customers were being contacted. But it could not pay anyone. Not its employees, not its hosting provider, not the contractors rebuilding its systems. The crisis had shifted from technology to cash. And cash, it turned out, had its own dependencies.

Failure mode

Most companies treat banking as a utility: always available, always responsive. In reality, financial operations depend on a stack of digital services that is just as fragile as the rest of the cloud ecosystem. Modern financial operations typically rely on cloud-based banking portals and neobank APIs, SaaS accounting and invoicing platforms, digital expense management tools, cloud-synced payroll processors, and payment gateways routed through US-controlled infrastructure. If a systemic disruption hits, several of these would fail simultaneously.

The result is not simply inconvenience. It is operational paralysis. The company cannot pay salaries, cannot settle invoices, cannot collect revenue, and cannot prove to its own bank that it has the authority to act. Unlike technical systems, financial systems carry hard deadlines: payroll dates, tax obligations, supplier payment terms, and loan covenants do not pause because a cloud provider is down.

A particularly dangerous failure mode is the authority gap. Banks are structurally conservative. When uncertainty rises, they default to inaction. If a company cannot verify its authorized signatories, or prove account ownership through normal digital channels, the bank will delay. It will not risk executing a fraudulent instruction. From the bank’s perspective, this is prudent. From the company’s perspective, it is a cash freeze at the worst possible moment.

The extraterritorial reach of the US dollar compounds this risk. Because a large share of global financial infrastructure clears through US-dollar-denominated systems, companies can be affected by US sanctions, legal orders, or regulatory actions even when they operate entirely outside the United States. Payment freezes, correspondent banking disruptions, and platform suspensions can cascade from geopolitical events that have nothing to do with the company itself.

Objectives

Financial preparedness ensures that the company retains the ability to move money, pay people, and meet obligations even when its primary financial infrastructure is disrupted. 

Specifically, the company must be able to:

• access operating cash through at least one independent channel,
• pay employees and critical suppliers within contractual or legal deadlines,
• prove signatory authority to financial institutions without relying on cloud-based tools,
• maintain a minimum financial picture: what the company owns, what it owes, and what is owed to it,
• continue invoicing and collecting revenue, even in degraded mode.

Solutions

Reduce single-bank and single-account risk

Concentrating all operating cash in a single bank account, or a single banking institution, is a single point of failure. If that account is frozen, if the bank’s online systems are unavailable, or if the institution itself is affected by sanctions, the company has no financial recourse.

Prepared companies distribute their operating cash across at least two banks, ideally in different jurisdictions. This does not require complex treasury management. It requires maintaining a secondary bank account with enough cash to cover a minimum of four to six weeks of critical expenses: payroll, hosting, and essential supplier payments.

The secondary account should be chosen deliberately. Favour a traditional European bank with robust financial ratios, physical branch access, independent online banking infrastructure, and SEPA connectivity - a “boring boomer bank”. Avoid concentrating both accounts with neobanks or fintechs that share the same underlying banking-as-a-service provider, as they may fail together.

Maintain offline access to banking