TIL banks still use COBOL for like 90% of their transactions and it blew my mind

I was reading this article the other day about how a lot of the big banks still run on COBOL code from the 1970s. I had no idea that was even a thing. Like, I figured by now everything would be on some fancy new system with apps and stuff. But apparently the whole backbone of payment processing for things like wire transfers and ACH still relies on this old language that barely anyone knows how to program anymore. It said something like 43% of banking systems still use it. That is wild to me. I work in a small credit union and we just upgraded our core system last year, took like 6 months of headaches. Makes me wonder how many bugs are hiding in that old code and what happens when the last COBOL guy retires. Has anyone else looked into how their bank handles the backend stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

evaallen2mo ago

43% of banking systems still running on COBOL? That's terrifying.

skylerp312mo ago

lol people always freak out about COBOL but mainframes are literally the most stable systems ever built. those things run for decades with 99.999% uptime and handle millions of transactions daily without breaking a sweat. rewriting everything in some trendy new language would take billions of dollars and years of testing, and the new system would probably crash every other week anyway. plus all those COBOL devs who know the code inside out are retiring, so banks have been slowly migrating to modern stuff for years already. the 43% number is probably way lower now than people think, it's just a stat that gets recycled every couple years for clicks. banking is one area where you really dont want to fix what isnt broken, especially when the alternative is rushing out buggy software that loses peoples money.

robin_roberts841mo ago

and my buddy @skylerp31 pretty much nailed it on the head with that whole stability argument. my friend works for a regional bank and their whole core processing system is still on COBOL from the 80s... it literally never crashes, like ever. the maintenance is basically just a handful of old guys who show up twice a month to check on it and then go home. banks have been saying they're going to migrate for like 20 years now but the cost and risk just keeps pushing the timeline out. i'd rather my savings be on some clunky old dinosaur that works than some shiny app that loses my money because of a typo in a javascript library.