When a major bank’s ATMs failed on a holiday weekend, it wasn’t a single “black swan.” It was the collision of gray swans—operational, architectural, and ecosystem risks compounding at the worst time. In this Disaster Stream episode, Bill Alderson interviews Bill Genovese (Kyndryl; ex-IBM GTS) on root causes, real fixes, and how to build resilience before the headlines hit.
What you’ll learn
Why multiple “gray swans” can equal a black-swan-scale event
Inside the outage: cross-platform dependencies, siloed ops, and anti-patterns
Practical resilience moves: enterprise diagrams, telemetry, DR you can failover and fail back, and six-nines targets for true “lifeblood” services
How regulators (Basel/BIS + central banks) are evolving risk views beyond “size of bank” to interconnectedness & substitutability
Why policies must be readable to be effective (featuring Nick Leghorn, New York Times)
Chapters
00:00 Welcome & show purpose—lessons → best practices
02:05 Guest intro: Bill Genovese (Kyndryl)
06:40 The holiday ATM outage: context, stakes, public trust
12:10 Gray swans vs black swans in banking ops
17:30 Anti-patterns across web/mid-tier/mainframe & how they fail
24:00 DR realities: testing, failback, and measuring what matters
30:40 Interconnected risk: cloud, fintech, cross-border ecosystems
36:10 Governance & regulators: Basel/BIS, supervision gaps
41:00 Writing usable security policies (Nick Leghorn teaser)
46:15 Takeaways & how to tell your responder story
Call to action
Have a real-world recovery story? Message us. We’ll extract lessons learned → best practices so others can be ready before the next gray swan lands.