Think about everyday operations: processing payments, settling trades, approving loans, handling compliance. These operations involve intricate, multi-step workflows connecting numerous systems, internal and external partners, often taking significant time to complete. Crucially, they must succeed reliably, and you need proof they did.

When Workflows Break Down

What happens when things go wrong mid-process? A network interruption, a database lock, a downstream service outage — failures are inevitable in distributed systems. How do you ensure a complex payment doesn’t leave money in limbo?

Consider sending money internationally. You might debit the sender, call an external service for FX rates, run compliance checks, coordinate with correspondent banks, and finally credit the recipient. If any step fails — say, the correspondent bank connection times out after the sender has been debited — how do you reliably roll back?

Traditionally, developers spent enormous effort building custom scaffolding: intricate state machines, message queues juggling tasks, complex retry logic, and manual compensation code to undo partial work. This plumbing code often buries the actual business logic, making systems brittle, hard to test, and incredibly difficult to debug when failures occur. This leads to a constant battle against complexity and potential inconsistency.

A Simpler Approach: Durable Execution

The concept of Durable Execution offers a more effective approach. Imagine writing your workflow logic clearly, focusing on the sequence of business steps, almost as if failures weren’t a concern. Behind the scenes, a platform automatically saves the progress at each step.

If a server crashes, a network connection fails, or even if a deployment happens mid-workflow, the platform ensures the process resumes exactly where it left off once things stabilize. It handles state persistence, retries, timers — all the complex failure handling — automatically. Your code stays focused on the business problem.

Implementing Durable Execution

How do development teams actually implement this Durable Execution pattern? Various open-source projects and managed cloud services provide platforms designed specifically for this purpose. Conceptually, these platforms typically allow developers to define:

1. Workflow Logic: Code written in standard programming languages that outlines the business process steps, including sequences, conditions, loops, and waits. This code expresses the desired flow.
2. Activity Tasks: The individual units of work within the workflow. These are the functions or methods that interact with the outside world — calling APIs, accessing databases, publishing messages, etc. Activities are designed to be retried independently in case of failure.

The core value of these platforms lies in taking responsibility for the hard parts of distributed systems reliability. When a workflow executes, the platform automatically persists its state at various points (often implicitly). If the process running the workflow crashes, or if there’s a network interruption or server failure, the platform ensures that the workflow resumes from its last persisted state once resources are available. It manages timers, orchestrates activity retries according to defined policies, and provides mechanisms for handling failures and compensations (like the saga pattern).

This abstraction allows developers to write complex, long-running, fault-tolerant applications while focusing primarily on the business logic, rather than spending excessive effort on building custom state management and recovery mechanisms. The underlying platform handles durability and reliability.

Real-World Impact in Financial Services

What does Durable Execution mean for financial services in practice?

Improving payment processing reliability and efficiency is a prime example. Given the multi-step nature of payments, handling failures gracefully and ensuring consistency (e.g., via compensating actions) is vital. Payment service providers like Mollie Payments have dramatically increased their operational efficiency and the reliability of payment flows by implementing Durable Execution techniques.

Financial institutions also face major challenges managing the complexity of their underlying infrastructure, especially with microservice architectures. Keeping critical backend systems running smoothly is non-negotiable. Companies like Wise Payments manage large-scale infrastructure, such as orchestrating complex database maintenance across a vast fleet with minimal downtime, by leveraging durable workflow patterns for reliable automation.

Furthermore, the principles behind Durable Execution influence how reliable financial applications are designed. Concepts like durable-driven design, discussed by fintechs such as equipifi, emphasize building robustness and fault tolerance directly into the software’s architecture. This design philosophy is essential in finance, ensuring that applications are dependable and that their operations (potentially needed for compliance reporting) leave a clear, auditable trail.

While these are specific examples, the broader principle is clear: Durable Execution helps manage the complexity and failure modes inherent in distributed financial systems. Whether it’s orchestrating payments, managing infrastructure, ensuring compliance processes run reliably, or handling customer onboarding sequences, the ability to define complex, stateful logic that survives failures is invaluable. This capability is why various financial services companies invest in or adopt platforms offering Durable Execution, allowing them to innovate faster while maintaining high standards of reliability.

Beyond Just Handling Failures

While resilience is the headline benefit, Durable Execution platforms bring more to the table. They provide built-in visibility into workflow state, making it far easier to see what’s running, what failed, and why. This significantly simplifies troubleshooting and operational monitoring.

Developers become more productive, shedding huge amounts of boilerplate code. Systems also become inherently more testable, as the workflow logic is clearer and can often be tested independently of the underlying infrastructure resilience.

Moving Forward

In finance, where system failures can have serious consequences, managing the complexity of modern software is vital. Durable Execution delivers strategic advantages beyond mere technical convenience. It allows teams to build sophisticated, reliable financial applications faster and operate them with more confidence.

By exploring and adopting open-source tools that embody this pattern, the financial services community can build more resilient, maintainable, and transparent systems — freeing up energy to focus on innovation instead of firefighting infrastructure issues.

Stop by our booth at OSFF London 2025! The Temporal team would love to discuss Durable Execution and hear your feedback on Temporal Cloud.

Author: Temporal Team