COBOL in a Bank

Question: I hearing about COBOL being used in banks quite often but all my friends who actually working there say Java and Oracle and all related job adverts I have seen so far were Java or C++. Could someone please provide some relevant facts?

My Answer: I work for one of the larger US banks, so I'm actually qualified to answer this question!

I'll narrow this down to one particular section of our consumer bank, because that serves as a fairly "clean" example, not much affected by outsourcing other complications.

Despite what you hear, this is NOT how our data center looks.

We have a "core banking system" -- the computer that keeps track of the account balances for customers and moves around the bits that represent dollars. This is implemented on 1960s technology: ours doesn't happen to be in Cobol, but it is written in a different language of similar vintage. The system is pretty rock-solid: as an example, it has only a couple hundred milliseconds at most for all of the processing needed to approve or decline a credit-card transaction in real-time, and it has no difficulty checking balances, restrictions, and business rules to enforce that -- that isn't so impressive until you consider that even the slowest transactions need to meet that limit and we still have to allow for network latencies. We struggle to find qualified programmers for this system: the few who are actually skilled in it can command pretty decent salaries and benefits, and we'll search around the world to find them. The system is not abandonware: we'd love if it were written in something more modern, but a complete rewrite would be an incredible undertaking (this system developed over several decades, and that is difficult to recreate). On the other hand, we ARE looking at questions like how to get it to run in the cloud.

So that's all true, but if you look through our technical job listings, you'll mostly find us looking for Java developers, PostgreSQL DBAs, Angular web-developers, and other such positions. That is because the core banking system is a tiny portion of what we do. In my specific area, we have roughly 20 development sprint teams (and a few other support folks not on those teams). Of those, ONE team has core banking system developers on it (along with some developers with other skill sets). By that estimate, it makes up 2% to 5% of the work we do.

The fact is, keeping track of the balance in your account is only ONE TINY PART of what your bank does. We have to keep track of your personal information (email address, mailing address, login id, etc). We have to serve you up a website. We have to process scanned checks, send out marketing emails, analyze traffic to detect fraud, and hundreds of other things. The core banking system (and other similar systems in similar companies) may be written in 1960s languages because the existing systems are robust and well-tested, but for that exact reason, they don't require a huge amount of development work.

Posted Mon 30 January 2017 by mcherm in Programming