what if they botch it
Will they forget how much money I have? I hope they do because I had a million pounds before their systems crashed ;) ;)
Euro banks will rip out EVERYTHING and buy proper backend systems ... LOL, fooled ya
European banks are in a "holding pattern" when it comes to integrating the latest technology into their core banking systems, with the majority only carrying out modernisation initiatives when necessary rather than with a view towards long-term transformation, according to a new survey. None of the 27 banks or two financial …
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Friday 29th August 2014 08:48 GMT Steve Todd
Financial IT spending
Is all about managing risk. It's risky, slow and expensive to put new core IT systems in place because of the number of other systems that speak to them. I was working for a large US bank while they replaced their general ledger system (or should I say systems, it was one CICS/COBOL application that had forked repeatedly). It took millions and years of effort to replace, and there were operational hiccups on the way.
Unless they really have to the banks would rather not change their systems because of the risk. Waving fancy cloud based systems at them is unlikely to help that.
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Friday 29th August 2014 12:44 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Financial IT spending
Unless they really have to the banks would rather not change their systems because of the risk.
And risk is "high" because....
1) We are currently running very fragile, very-high risk, undocumented shite that no-one knows how to manage properly anymore (possibly written by overpaid primadonnas that rode their Ferraris into the sunset some time ago)
2) We are NOT going to pay for the skills (if they can even be bought) to build stuff from scratch.
PAINTED INTO A CORNER LOL!
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Friday 29th August 2014 13:24 GMT keithpeter
Re: Financial IT spending
"(possibly written by overpaid primadonnas that rode their Ferraris into the sunset some time ago)"
Your average COBOL programming drone in the 1960s/1970s(?) wasn't driving any posh cars. Perhaps a two tone chocolate/burnt orange Vauxhall Viva with tartan seat covers on a finance agreement.
The documentation would exist (I believe they coded from specs) but would include magic numbers and administration codes based on the version of the manual that was current when the code was written.
I suspect the Posh Italian Car brigade were more on the investment banking side and more recently. Perhaps the APL wizards got a Jaguar.
Not arguing with your general point however.
Tramp Icon: I was doing BASIC on a teletype with a modem (that had a dial on the front) at College then. We got to visit a Data Processing Unit once as part of the course. Seriously large tape machines. Very short mini-skirts.
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Wednesday 3rd September 2014 00:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Financial IT spending
The documentation would exist (I believe they coded from specs) but would include magic numbers and administration codes based on the version of the manual that was current when the code was written.
Excessively optimistic. Most of the large mainframe application suites I've seen at customer sites are hugely stovepiped; there may have been specs at one point in time, but decades of changes and additions have made those specs largely useless.
And those are the better sites. I've fielded numerous queries from customers and potential customers asking if we can decompile mainframe programs back into COBOL, because they've lost the sources.
Regulatory changes, new financial products, mergers and acquisitions all cause a lot of churn in a bank's back-end systems. Even with ALM and application-portfolio-analysis tools, it can be extremely difficult to figure out what thousands of interoperating programs do. That's why rip-and-replace projects generally fail.
(Anon since I'm making vague references to customers.)
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Friday 29th August 2014 08:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
I worked for an insurance firm with much the same issues. It took ten years to move from green screen entry to a webpage. A lot of validation was put into the page that was never in the terminal but all the processing is still done by COBOL programs noone understands fully and they've got no plans to replace it.
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Friday 29th August 2014 09:52 GMT Frankee Llonnygog
It's not hard to start a bank now
Licenses are much more easily acquitted, and banking engines are, if not exactly commoditised, no longer proprietary secret sauce. The most expensive things you need are Fraud, Regulatory, Compliance and Risk teams - a potential outsourcing market opportunity for someone!
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Friday 29th August 2014 09:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Replace why?
Really, why should banks replace their working systems, safe in the mainframe, by new fangled unsafe and easily accessed by the NSA cloud systems? If knew the bank I use started replacing their systems, and were even looking at cloud computing, I'd take my money out that instant!
Of course, I'd also ask for a few large loans, a bank that is dumb enough to transfer their business to the cloud is also probably dumb enough to loan me a few millions without the need of a co-lateral.
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Friday 29th August 2014 09:57 GMT hidaraf
So what?
Banking core has 30+ years of age. Yes.
Was done by retired (age, RIF,..) people.
Nobody understands it. Not the new Kids in management, all ful of really new concepts, slides, and nice words.
Thing is, Banking needs security. So that means Good programming techniques, Good performance,Resiliency, DR practices, Change management... .
Knowledge.
Samething nowadays is missing/failing/dying.
Remember RBS.
Who paid for the FAIL ?
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Friday 29th August 2014 12:07 GMT Stretch
I could not be more happy...
...than to be told that the banks are running reliable, thoroughly specified and tested, rock solid zSeries and iSeries platforms running CICS and COBOL and RPG.
These things WORKED. A lot of effort was put in by well qualified and intelligent people.
Farming things to India to be poorly coded in .net from non-existent designs and then implementing without exhaustive testing DOES NOT WORK.
Just because it doesn't have Cloud written on the side does not mean you should replace it.
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Friday 29th August 2014 12:19 GMT Pascal Monett
OK, can we cut it out with the cloudy bull already ?
A "private cloud" ? Is that all they could come up with ?
All Fortune 1000 companies already have private clouds - it's called internal servers, for fucks' sake. Somebody needs to stop smoking the carpet.
Any bank that puts banking data of any kind into the hands of any 3rd-party supplier, be it IBM, is a bank I will not have ANY dealings with.
You go on and put your private life, family pictures and whatever else you want on the cloud - your business, your decision, you deal with the consequences.
MY stuff stays as private as I can manage it, thank you.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
