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nBanks, reconhecida pela AI² como entidade adequada para atividades de I&D

27 de outubro de 2026

Silence Is the Proof of Reliability: When Nothing Happens, Something Is Working

In company finance, the best infrastructure goes unnoticed: no failed syncs, unexplained entries or month-end surprises. That silence reflects systems built, tested and monitored to perform reliably.

Daniel Silva

On a good morning, a treasurer opens one screen and the overnight movements from every bank are already there. Balances agree with the statements and there is no email from IT about a failed connection. Nobody remarks on a morning like that, which is the point. In September 1991, Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC opened an article in Scientific American with this line: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Further on, he gave the reason: "Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it."


Disappearing is not the same as being absent. In 1995, Weiser and John Seely Brown wrote "Designing Calm Technology", using driving as one example. At the wheel, our attention is on the road and not on the engine, yet "an unusual noise is noticed immediately". A calm technology, they wrote, "will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back." That is a fair standard for finance systems. The quiet only has value if something underneath is still listening, so the one failed sync or unrecognised payment comes forward at once, while everything else stays out of the way.


Failure is loud. In April 2018, TSB, a UK retail bank, migrated the data for its corporate and customer services onto a new IT platform. According to the Financial Conduct Authority, "the data itself migrated successfully", but the platform "immediately experienced technical failures". All of TSB's branches and a significant proportion of its 5.2 million customers were affected, and business as usual did not return until December 2018. In December 2022, the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority fined TSB £48.65 million. The data was never the problem. The layer that carried it was, and once it broke, it took eight months to make it quiet again.


Breakdowns like this are becoming less frequent, but not cheaper. Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis 2026 reports that, for a fifth consecutive year, outage frequency per site is declining. Yet in Uptime's 2025 survey, 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than US$100,000, and for the second year running one in five reported costs above US$1 million. Third-party IT and data centre providers have accounted for about two-thirds of the public outages Uptime has tracked over nine years. In July 2024, a single faulty CrowdStrike update affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft.


Regulators no longer leave that quiet to chance. The EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) entered into application on 17 January 2025. The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority describes its aim as ensuring that banks, insurers, investment firms and other financial entities "can withstand, respond to, and recover from" ICT disruptions. It applies to 20 types of financial entities and to ICT third-party service providers. A finance team does not need to be regulated to borrow the logic: any provider between a company and its banks should be able to say where the data lives, how recovery is tested, who watches at night and where clients can check that all is well.


Those questions are a fair way to read nBanks, the Porto and Lisbon company whose platform connects businesses to 5,000+ banks across 75+ countries. Its security page opens with "Secure by design. Safe by default." and adds: "Security isn't a feature we added, it's the foundation we built on." Of its three principles, confidentiality, integrity and availability, the third gets one plain sentence: "EU-hosted cloud with geographically distributed backups and tested recovery keeps you running." Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and "Everything stays within the EU." Access follows a Zero Trust model, "Never trust, Always verify", and a security operations centre runs 24/7 because "Threats don't keep office hours, and neither do we."


nBanks also states that it is compliant with PSD2, the Payment Services Directive, and links a public status page from its website, so the quiet can be checked rather than assumed. Pedro Sá, financial manager at Mota-Engil Africa, says nBanks gives the company central control and real-time access to 285 bank accounts held across 33 operations in 16 countries. On most days, none of that should be visible. If the treasurer opens one screen and finds nothing to chase, the infrastructure underneath has done its job, and the silence is the evidence.



Sources

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