When ATMs Fail: Banking Outages, Black Swans & Digital Risk

In this episode of the Disaster.Stream Podcast, host Bill Alderson sits down with Bill Genovese, CIO Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, to explore one of the most high-stakes failures in modern banking: a nationwide ATM outage during a holiday weekend.

Drawing from decades of global experience with IBM, Kyndryl, and Big Four consulting, Genovese shares how banking systems can unravel in moments — and why recovery often requires more than just technology. Together, they examine how black swan events (rare, catastrophic failures) and gray swan events (compounding, foreseeable risks) threaten not just banks but entire national economies.

🔑 What you’ll learn in this episode:

• The true impact of a bank losing all ATMs before a holiday
• Black swan vs. gray swan risks — and why multiple gray swans can be worse
• Lessons from IBM’s global SWAT teams on crisis response and remediation
• How banking regulations, international oversight, and resilience standards shape recovery strategies
• Why digital transformation and multi-cloud dependencies increase complexity
• Practical lessons financial institutions can adopt to build resilience

👥 Featured voices:

• Bill Genovese (Kyndryl) — global expert on financial services architecture, resiliency, and risk advisory
• Nick Leghorn (New York Times) — application security leader, on how to write cybersecurity policies people will actually follow
• ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) — professional community strengthening global cybersecurity practices

💡 Key Takeaway:

There is no cookie-cutter solution for disaster recovery. Each bank and enterprise has a unique “technology fingerprint” that requires holistic analysis across people, process, and technology. True resilience means planning for the compounding risks of our interconnected world.