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Is Old Tech Putting Banks Under Threat Of Extinction? (bbc.co.uk)

Matthew Wall from the BBC has written a fascinating piece detailing our reliance on banks in today's connected and ever-changing world of technology. The premise: "You put your card in the cash machine but nothing comes out. The bank's IT systems have crashed again. But you need money fast, so what do you do? It's an unsettling scenario that is likely to become more common over the next few years as the big banks try to upgrade their IT systems, experts are warning."

Bruce66423 writes: In the old days everything was batch programs and reconciled once a day. Now, online access and the expectation that money will be immediately available makes the old systems obsolete, but impossible to replace because there are layers upon layers of complexity...

208 comments

  1. the War on Cash by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    is Killing banks faster.

    1. Re:the War on Cash by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's killing the branch offices but the central offices are still doing pretty well.

      Banks makes money on lending money to people and collecting interest on that money. They actually don't want you to mortgage the loans you take but they accept it as it is also lowering the risk for them.

      Personnel and offices - that's what costs banks money so therefore they want to centralize. Online banking is cheap for the banks. But a fast-changing economy is requiring system updates on a frequent basis and when the old classic systems are written in Cobol there are a massive number of things that can go wrong if the changes made aren't tested thoroughly. Cobol is a bit dated when it comes to coding strategies and even though there are object oriented variants they aren't easy to integrate into the minds of people that have been coding Cobol for the last 40 or more years. But coding Cobol is actually pretty well-paid since not many are good at Cobol today and it has even created a market for retired people to come back and code.

      What the current banks shall fear is new upcoming banks that have thrown off the old Cobol yoke and started to look at modern languages with strong typing and strict bounds checks.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:the War on Cash by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Handling cash and running branches is expensive and something banks have actively been discouraging here. Withdrawing larger sums (not talking 5 figures here) requires an appointment, and depositing cash comes with a charge even if you use an ATM for it. They have also funded several large campaigns to get shopkeepers to adopt debit card terminals (credit cards are hardly used for day-to-day transactions here). Banks *love* a cashless society.

      With that said, our banks seem to have handled the transition to instant transactions just fine already. On a holiday in Tel Aviv, I used my debit card to pay for something but the machine didn't ask for a PIN. I wanted to make sure the shop got their money, even though the clerk assured me everything was ok. Sure enough, my phone showed the transaction right there, seconds later. The reverse happened when I bought an expensive second hand car. I transfered the money to the guys account from his living room; he used his computer to see the money arriving at the same moment. The latter was only possible because the guy was with the same bank; transactions between banks still dake 1-2 days to complete, but it would appear that the banks have had their internal accounting stuff modernised already.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    3. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Generally transactions are (almost) immediately listed as pending transactions. They may not finalize for a day or two. In my experience, they are reflected in the available balance, but not the actual balance for an account. It may show up right away, but the transaction almost certainly hasn't finalized at that time.

    4. Re:the War on Cash by kibou · · Score: 0

      When someone says "technology is killing banks" what you really mean "bitcoin, the new technology for decentralization and cryptography is killing banks". Because that is what is already happening. It's real. Banks already know. Media is obsolete and is crumbling as well. They are not able to even grasp what is going on right now in the fintech world. The most common reaction when a big change is coming is deny it. It is just what is happening now. Most people deny what is happening. So bitcoin is here and it is moving forward everyday. A decentralized system of trust that lets people send cheap assets through out the world just with no more than a nokia 1100 in your hands.

    5. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      When someone says "technology is killing banks" what you really mean "bitcoin, the new technology for decentralization and cryptography is killing banks". Because that is what is already happening. It's real. Banks already know. Media is obsolete and is crumbling as well. They are not able to even grasp what is going on right now in the fintech world.
      The most common reaction when a big change is coming is deny it. It is just what is happening now. Most people deny what is happening.
      So bitcoin is here and it is moving forward everyday. A decentralized system of trust that lets people send cheap assets through out the world just with no more than a nokia 1100 in your hands.

      Calm down there, Skippy. You're getting quite ahead of yourself. The average human still doesn't even know what a bitcoin is, let alone why it exists.

    6. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Should they use Rust instead?

    7. Re:the War on Cash by jafiwam · · Score: 0

      When someone says "technology is killing banks" what you really mean "bitcoin, the new technology for decentralization and cryptography is killing banks". Because that is what is already happening. It's real. Banks already know. Media is obsolete and is crumbling as well. They are not able to even grasp what is going on right now in the fintech world. The most common reaction when a big change is coming is deny it. It is just what is happening now. Most people deny what is happening. So bitcoin is here and it is moving forward everyday. A decentralized system of trust that lets people send cheap assets through out the world just with no more than a nokia 1100 in your hands.

      Calm down there, Skippy. You're getting quite ahead of yourself. The average human still doesn't even know what a bitcoin is, let alone why it exists.

      And those at the higher end of the IQ bell curve know it's a stupid thing to 'bank' on.

    8. Re:the War on Cash by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Let me know when bitcoin can handle 2000 transactions per second, which is just equivalent to VISA average.

    9. Re: the War on Cash by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Please quit spamming

    10. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you talking about? It's a legitimate question. Rust is designed for complex, high reliability systems. That's exactly the situation we have with banking. I'm sorry if you're so set in your ways that you won't consider modern technology, but please do not disrupt the discussion here with your fslse accusations and negativity. We are trying to have a technical discussion here.

    11. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Nobody cares about your nerdcoin. Not until you can pay your taxes in it.

    12. Re:the War on Cash by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What the current banks shall fear is new upcoming banks that have thrown off the old Cobol yoke and started to look at modern languages with strong typing and strict bounds checks.

      No, I think what both banks and customers should fear are banks switching from old flow-oriented languages to modern languages that abstract everything in dozens of layers and black box libraries outside your control, making it near impossible to troubleshoot what's actually happening.
      And when they switch from real time systems, which are slow but you're guaranteed a result by a deadline, to the best effort systems that are all that modern programmers know.

      What banks need is certainly modernization, but not to the popular programming methods of today. They need full transparency, strict operating deadlines, atomic operations, containment, a focus on worst case, and testing algorithms more than runtime.
      Perhaps replacements for COBOL, Ada and Fortran are needed, but I think it needs to be engineered by someone who understands what's different, and why.

      It's not good enough for a bank to make 99% of customers happier. If software causes problems for 1%, they risk losing major customers or licenses to operate.

    13. Re:the War on Cash by G-forze · · Score: 2

      Well, I can't pay my taxes with US dollars, since I live in Europe. But they still have their use from time to time. The same goes for bitcoins, which I use quite often.

      --
      "There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
    14. Re:the War on Cash by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      Ada is at least object oriented from the beginning, so that language may still be useful.

      So far I just pointed out that it was a problem running Cobol in the long run due to the problem of programmers fluent in that are dying off.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    15. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. It's clunky old kludges that are causing issues.

      The world's banks have to do what this guy did :

      https://delimiter.com.au/2014/05/02/end-era-cio-harte-leaves-commbank/

      Complete rewrite. Very successful

    16. Re: the War on Cash by arth1 · · Score: 2

      Generally transactions are (almost) immediately listed as pending transactions. They may not finalize for a day or two. In my experience, they are reflected in the available balance, but not the actual balance for an account. It may show up right away, but the transaction almost certainly hasn't finalized at that time.

      You are probably American, or from another country that uses payee-initiated transfers and/or still supports cheques.
      In much of the world, banking is instantaneous now, with no "clearing" (payee-initiated systems) or "float" (payer-initiated systems) periods.
      In "modern"[*] systems, when I transfer a sum to your account, it is immediately unavailable to me and available for withdrawal in your account as fast as the handshake can fly over the wires.

      [*]: I say "modern", because the giro system for payer-initiated transfers between different banks is from the 1960s, but the abolition of "float" where each bank would hold on to the money for a business day (night time batch processing) went away in the 80s and 90s.

    17. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOLWUT??

      Fanboi detected. Don't expect to have a rational conversation with this one.

    18. Re:the War on Cash by arth1 · · Score: 2

      So far I just pointed out that it was a problem running Cobol in the long run due to the problem of programmers fluent in that are dying off.

      The good side is that it's an easy language to learn.
      What's hard about it is changing the mindset. You truly can't think modern programming and translate it into your head into COBOL; you have to attack the problems from a COBOL point of view.

      I hate COBOL[*], but it lends itself to K.I.S.S. and easy debugging.

      [*]: To be fair, I hate all programming languages. The more abstracted, the more I hate them.

    19. Re:the War on Cash by flyingfsck · · Score: 1

      A bank is simply an IT business with ridiculously high usage fees. The 'war on cash' is another way for banks to skim money off every transaction.

      --
      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    20. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Working for a bank's IT department, I can definitely state that most of their software is expected to be cheap and delivered fast with quality being a very distant 5th place. Only the accounts themselves are required to be reliable (or reliable enough that the customers don't catch on). So forget about all the yammering about fancy languages and frameworks. The must-be-reliable programs are almost always COBOL dinosaurs. Not because COBOL is better for that, but simply because the core account operations were written back when that was about the only choice around.

      Banks also don't care about making 99% or more of the customers happy. As in most businesses, only about 1% of their customers are worth the effort. The rest of you guys can please wait for the next available representative.

    21. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Final is as fast as English/French/German in computer languages. Actually the fastest languages are assembly, and the compiler languages. That's because all languages have to run to a machine level. Designed for a machine. The machine is created to do a function, like distribute monies. Then you add switches and sensors to be aware of and to distribute output and collect inputs, and registers to care for, but things have to be added or the machine stops working. And sensors can be fooled, and bills can stick together, to foul mechanisms, how, does the bank president overcome that? Staff. So bank president hires an it guy, who doesn't like outside, people, or machines, and have them attempt to supply the machine. And a teller because the president don't like to meet people openly, they smell of work. And a guard, you cannot please all the people all the time, and there may be unpleasant annoying other people who are po'ed there. So maybe your machine is too slow, is that because the net occupied by haters who want your money, instead of earning it?

    22. Re:the War on Cash by religionofpeas · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Also, let me know when you'll stop using the -1 mod for "Disagree, but I can't think of a good reply"

    23. Re:the War on Cash by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This MEME really needs to die. Old Cobol code isn't an issue any more than old ASM is an issue to Windows.

      Banks didn't update their backend cobol systems for this shit, they put new front ends in front of it. Haven't done some brief contracting for a couple who essentially write everything in C# and have literally one guy that knows Cobol and 'the mainframe' that helps them interface to it with VERY MINIMAL IF ANY code changes at all. You make the new front-end interoperate with the back-end and you leave the back-end the fuck alone until its completely replaced.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    24. Re: the War on Cash by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Then offer something technical rather than asking the same empty question multiple times in the same article as an Anonymous Coward.

    25. Re: the War on Cash by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Three time you have asked this same silly question in this article.

      No, Rust isn't the answer. Their problem isn't the language they use, it's the huge infrastructure that they have in place which needs to be refactored. The choice of programming language is a very minor consideration and by itself won't solve the problem

    26. Re: the War on Cash by arth1 · · Score: 1

      If you're going to troll, at least try to be a little less blatant.

    27. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why do you hate Rust????

    28. Re:the War on Cash by knightghost · · Score: 1

      That's why I switched to a Credit Union. They are happy to see me, everything is updated in real time, and open when I need them.

    29. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >...Cobol...

      Note the problem is as much about accounting as it is technical framework, Jean Michel.

    30. Re:the War on Cash by dcollins · · Score: 1

      "Banks makes money on lending money to people and collecting interest on that money."

      In the past that was their primary income stream. Nowadays it is, very roughly, split about 50/50 between interest income and non-interest income. The latter would include transaction fees, penalty fees, insured devices, safety deposit boxes, etc.

      http://seekingalpha.com/article/1568752-bank-chart-of-the-week-how-important-is-fee-income-to-banks
      https://chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/economic-perspectives/2004/ep-4qtr2004-part3-deyoung-rice-pdf.pdf

      --
      We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
    31. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      and depositing cash comes with a charge even if you use an ATM for it.

      Who and where the hell does that? I have never once in been charged a fee to give a bank money.

    32. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The problems in banking stem from layers of poor quality solutions, data quality, and a culture of delivering the minimum.

      A different implementation language isn't going to help. On top of that, Rust hasn't proven itself, is going to cause hiring difficulties, and there is no reason to believe it's a magic bullet anyway.

    33. Re: the War on Cash by hawguy · · Score: 1

      Now that Rust is available and mature, when do you see banks adopting it? I presume the best banks are already rewriting their software to use Rust. Maybe the stragglers will start using it next year?

      When Rust is available and mature enough for banks to consider using it, then there will be another new, even shinier, language around the corner that will address all of the shortcomings of Rust. Which is why banks are still running a lot of Cobol code.

    34. Re: the War on Cash by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

      Why do you hate Rust????

      The real question is, "Why does Rust hate America?"

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    35. Re: the War on Cash by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

      If you're going to troll, at least try to be a little less blatant.

      Agreed. As if we couldn't see with our own eyes that "Rust" and "Trump" have almost the exact same letters.

      Coincidence? I think not!

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    36. Re:the War on Cash by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 0

      When someone says "technology is killing banks" what you really mean "bitcoin, the new technology for decentralization and cryptography is killing banks". Because that is what is already happening. It's real. Banks already know. Media is obsolete and is crumbling as well. They are not able to even grasp what is going on right now in the fintech world.

      Lol, is it April 1st already??

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    37. Re:the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 2

      Actually, banks have no use for hard real time. What they need is bullet proof transactions and audit trails. Does it ACTUALLY matter if the ATM transaction that is allowed 11.2 seconds takes 11.3 to complete? What does matter is that the debit to the account happens without fail if and only if cash is dispensed. AND they need to be able to prove it through audit logs.

    38. Re:the War on Cash by techhead79 · · Score: 1

      Learning the language is not the problem, it's the framework. Think about J2EE. Java is easy to learn if you already understood OOP. But J2EE is very difficult to learn because of all the frameworks that can be and must be used with it. COBOL is the same way today but it's far worse because each company over decades created their own way of building solutions to the same problems. Then you have the MF itself and all the tools that are either custom made or bastardized versions of vendor crap. Learning COBOL isn't the problem, it never was.

    39. Re:the War on Cash by reboot246 · · Score: 1

      I need them on Saturday, and no credit unions for 100 miles around me are open on Saturday. That's why I use a bank instead.

      Yours is?

    40. Re:the War on Cash by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Actually, banks have no use for hard real time. What they need is bullet proof transactions and audit trails. Does it ACTUALLY matter if the ATM transaction that is allowed 11.2 seconds takes 11.3 to complete? What does matter is that the debit to the account happens without fail if and only if cash is dispensed. AND they need to be able to prove it through audit logs.

      One word: Cambio

      If you know you can put in a big transaction before a new exchange rate goes into effect, you can make or save millions. Much like knowing you can get a last bid in before a bourse closes. The people at the other end are not going to give you old rates or reopen a bourse because someone ran a tough query at your end which delayed your transaction.
      Fast is good, guaranteed is better.

    41. Re:the War on Cash by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      If you know you can put in a big transaction before a new exchange rate goes into effect, you can make or save millions.

      Make or save *millions* ... thanks. Good advice for all of us here on /. :-)

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    42. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep. Although I am in another state. I can remote deposit at many ATMs, on my phone, or at many other CUs throughout the country. Oh and two networks of free ATMs.

    43. Re: the War on Cash by JoeZeppy · · Score: 1

      The too big to fail financial institution I work for, which processes about a third of the world's economy every day, is very excited about exploring the possibilities of the blockchain technology that underlies Bitcoin. I don't know if they know for sure what they're going to do with it, but they're looking at it.

    44. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why would anyone want to pay taxes? You're looking at things analogous to a media company saying, "we have the DRM that customers have been asking for."

    45. Re:the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      That's actually a good argument for introducing random delays in transaction systems.

    46. Re: the War on Cash by Carewolf · · Score: 2

      [*]: I say "modern", because the giro system for payer-initiated transfers between different banks is from the 1960s, but the abolition of "float" where each bank would hold on to the money for a business day (night time batch processing) went away in the 80s and 90s.

      Try transfering money internationally across banks on different electronic systems. The float still exists.

    47. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      There is no good reason to introduce intentional delays into transactions. None.

      You're late for your Bernie rally. Pick up your organic water on the way, k? Bibi.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    48. Re:the War on Cash by techfilz · · Score: 1

      Spot on with your comments. And in a modern DevOps environment, you dont need to treat the Mainframe Developers (and their associated Ops colleagues) any different to the Java (or similar) guys. Put them all together and get them collaborating and treat the Mainframe like any other Server (albeit with a bit more care). There are enough people out there looking for jobs that you can get a code academy to train some junior COBOL devs for you or x-train some of the Java guys. The offshore guys in Eastern Europe (Belarus for example) can do some quality COBOL code if needed. The Indians also built up a lot of COBOL skills for Y2K that they can still deploy and they are not adverse to retraining if required. I dont think that you can beat the mainframe for transaction handling right now (like overnight batch for ATMs) except in some isolated cases. Compare some modern Core Banking platforms with MF on transactions per second - as in actually do performance testing and not just listen to the Vendors empty promises. Sure you have places like Google and Amazon where the Devs are brilliant & can manage just about anything on new platforms but that's not the case in the Banks :-)

    49. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The bitcoin network can already handle 2000tps. You are confusing confirmations on the blockchain and the mempool. In the future bitcoin will also be able to handle way over 2000 confirmations per second with payment channels like the lightning network.

    50. Re: the War on Cash by KGIII · · Score: 1

      It takes an exceedingly long time (comparatively speaking) because of all the notices and checks that are made to it. At least that's how it was explained to me. I've moved large sums across borders. It varies but can take as little as a couple of days or up to a week - depending on transfer type and what it is a transfer to.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    51. Re:the War on Cash by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I believe you'll find you're money is always cash. As far as I know, they don't charge to deposit money. They charge to deposit cash. Cash has some problems of its own, from security to physical storage, and they seem to want to minimize its use - and we can speculate about the reasons for that.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    52. Re: the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      There are several. Top of the list is shooting down people looking to collect rent.

    53. Re:the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The day my bank charges me to make a deposit, cash or electronic, is the day I switch banks AND call to tell them why. And then the social media campaign to tell all their other depositors about their practices to start a boycott of that bank.

    54. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      Ah, so it's about free stuff.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    55. Re: the War on Cash by Agripa · · Score: 1

      You are probably American, or from another country that uses payee-initiated transfers and/or still supports cheques.
      In much of the world, banking is instantaneous now, with no "clearing" (payee-initiated systems) or "float" (payer-initiated systems) periods.

      What is in it for the bank? How would they make money off of the float and cause insufficient funds charges?

    56. Re: the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      Not that kind of rent. Look up economic rent.

    57. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      Well, be specific. Libertarianspeak is harder to spot than sarcasm.

      And even 'economic rent' is either paid or not. If it's OK to delay payment for some contrived reason, just as the price is assumed to be contrived, then we are perhaps arguing over the time? Is 'never' an acceptable time?

      Contrived.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    58. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So true. You have to look to a different market and mindset. Most of the COBOL guys I know are pretty much close to hanging up their keyboards for surf boards. The new generation has a hard time thinking procedural.

    59. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So true.

    60. Re: the War on Cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I couldn't give less of a shit about bitcoin or whatever. COBOL enforced standards. Few of today's spaghetti coders could handle the discipline.

    61. Re:the War on Cash by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      It's killing the branch offices but the central offices are still doing pretty well.

      Banks makes money on lending money to people and collecting interest on that money. They actually don't want you to mortgage the loans you take but they accept it as it is also lowering the risk for them.

      Personnel and offices - that's what costs banks money so therefore they want to centralize. Online banking is cheap for the banks. But a fast-changing economy is requiring system updates on a frequent basis and when the old classic systems are written in Cobol there are a massive number of things that can go wrong if the changes made aren't tested thoroughly. Cobol is a bit dated when it comes to coding strategies and even though there are object oriented variants they aren't easy to integrate into the minds of people that have been coding Cobol for the last 40 or more years. But coding Cobol is actually pretty well-paid since not many are good at Cobol today and it has even created a market for retired people to come back and code.

      What the current banks shall fear is new upcoming banks that have thrown off the old Cobol yoke and started to look at modern languages with strong typing and strict bounds checks.

      Re Cobol Systems and Cobol programmers. Old programmers know the bank systems intimately. They can make changes faster than someone writing object oriented code. OO creation of or creating new classes is fraught with hidden errors or side effects.

      Branches are required for currency exchanges, loans, mortgages and cheque casing, letters of credit, helping small businesses and more. PAP eliminates handling the branch a dozen cheques to hold and deposit on the appropriate date. Not all transactions are PAP.

      Seniors on fixed pensions visit branches on payment due dates or just after that date to make payments. This is done by them in order to avoid Insufficient funds fees/penalties if they were using PAP.

      Yes, branches are still required.

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
    62. Re: the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      That's not libertarian speak. I am far from that. It's mainstream economics and the term is centuries old. You clearly don't understand the issue well enough to take an opposition position on the matter. Do get educated. At least look up what rent means in this context first. You might find the term 'arbitrage' useful as well.

      I'm trying to be nice about it, but you're making that difficult.

    63. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      Don't be nice.

      I understand arbitrage. It is invariably based on unequal knowledge, which seems unfair, and is, but such an argument could be made about many markets and transactions. But 'economic rent' implies a coercive element. So is an infinite delay in payment (as in never paying) acceptable? Or, more likely, do you argue that delaying the transaction offers some way to mitigate the inequality?

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    64. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      BTW, my employer used to delay some transactions at their prerogative to benefit their customers, specifically to offer them a more favorable exchange rate on foreign currency exchanges. We do that less now, as many customers prefer consistency and prompt settlement to favorable exchange rates. Greater utility to speed than cost in their cases. But if we introduced random timing, I suspect we would get complaints.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    65. Re:the War on Cash by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      That's not what we have here in Sweden.

      There are only a few bank offices left and only a few of them handles cash. We are here talking about the bank office death. Same thing with post offices they are rare these days - and placed in obscure locations to keep down the number of drop-in customers.

      For most people the bank transactions today are done online.

      I assume that with PAP you mean Pre-authorized payment. (Acronyms don't do well when you are in circles outside your business)

      For Cobol programmers the problem is that when the old ones retires and dies off there are too few new ones coming in that knows how to handle the code. Cobol is only easy to read for someone used to that paradigm.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    66. Re: the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      Keep in mind, I'm talking about delays on the order of seconds. I doubt human customers would even notice. The objective would be to prevent the shenanigans of high speed trading from spreading.

    67. Re: the War on Cash by sjames · · Score: 1

      Consider the stock market. Being a single rack closer to the exchange systems costs millions and can return billions in benefits. If your system isn't in the same room, you might as well go home.

      Introduce a random delay of 1-5 seconds and suddenly it becomes all about making good decisions again. A server in the broom closet in Seattle has just as much chance of executing a good trade as one sitting one rack over from the exchange. Move to a 5 minute quantum system and a sharp human at a terminal stands a chance against HFT.

      It's bad enough that the stock market is subject to flash crashes, do we really want to expand that to all banking?

      The impact on actual productive economic activity would be zero but the overhead would plummet.

    68. Re: the War on Cash by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      HST should be delayed on human - scale time, minutes.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    69. Re:the War on Cash by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      You can get open-source COBOL compilers (and I told my son never to bring one into the house), so you can learn it with no problem. However, COBOL is usually run on IBM systems with lots of ancient frameworks that are proprietary and do not have open source equivalents, so you can't learn to be a good COBOL programmer without having access to expensive software.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    70. Re:the War on Cash by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Bitcoin isn't a good replacement for banking. It relies on transactions being computationally expensive, while bank translations can be computationally cheap. If Bitcoin is cheaper than banking, it means that the banks are being inefficient, or milking the profit, or that they're following legal mandates that Bitcoin skips.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  2. What complexity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What complexity can there be in accounting how much money somebody has and changing it in specific events like taking some at the ATM? Maybe there is much to do in logging / accountability, but even this can't be that hard.

    1. Re:What complexity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suspect banks like the system of holding onto deposits and not updating balances immediately. One reason is probably that if they hold money, they're also able to loan it out and collect interest. I also suspect it makes it easier to collect overdraft fees, which are extremely profitable for banks. There may be technical reasons, too, but the system is definitely advantageous to banks as it is.

    2. Re: What complexity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is the problem of writing software with no bugs and no security holes. In addition you need a lot if monitoring and interfaces to other banks etc. Ince you have core functionality you need to calculate interests, loans and implement all sort if functionality. Again, it is wasy but it can't have any bugs.

    3. Re:What complexity? by tomhath · · Score: 1

      There's more to banking than ATM and POS transactions.

    4. Re:What complexity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They queue the transactions into a batch process.

      The process runs debits first then credits.

      As such, it first processes all the withdrawals, payment, etc. Then it processes any deposits.

      The upshot of which is, you can get a direct deposit on Friday, go out Friday morning and pay your bills or buy stuff.
      Although the deposit is in the batch, it processes after the payments and the bank gets to collect overdraft fees should your payments exceed the total in the account before the deposit.

      So, although you have the money and have been paid, the bank gets to hit you with fee's only because of the way they line up the batch processing. If they were to process deposits first (As many credit unions do) it cuts down the number of NSF fees they can collect by more than half.

    5. Re:What complexity? by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 2

      So, although you have the money and have been paid, the bank gets to hit you with fee's only because of the way they line up the batch processing. If they were to process deposits first (As many credit unions do) it cuts down the number of NSF fees they can collect by more than half.

      No bank worth their salt does it that way anymore.

      It might have been true years ago, but it isn't true today.

      I bank with Bank of America. All their "big bank" issues aside, they don't do what you describe. They provide a "pending balance" for anything credited and only charge fees if you go over your balance at the end of the day and haven't made it up.

      If by chance you DO have a bank doing that, then leave, that is stupid.

    6. Re:What complexity? by sumdumass · · Score: 1

      My bank which is a local community bank actually processes deposits before debits. I can overdraft on Friday night and deposit a check on Sunday in the overnight box and have it in before the overdraft hits.

      They also pay the ATM fees if you withdraw $50 or more at a time at the ATM to make up for the lack of ATMs they own being a smaller bank.

      Not all banks are the greedy types.

    7. Re:What complexity? by nukenerd · · Score: 1

      I suspect banks like the system of holding onto deposits and not updating balances immediately. There may be technical reasons too .......

      Yes, the technical reason is that the banks were wired up in the olden days when the speed of light was only 2mph.

  3. The BBC Tech folks are clueless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That article is so full of errors it's almost as if the journalist who wrote it doesn't have a clue what a mainframe is or why you need central computing to run a bank.

    Don't bother wasting your time analysing it, it's nonsense.

    I've worked with mainframes for 34 years and started out working for a bank.

    1. Re:The BBC Tech folks are clueless by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      Why do you even need a mainframe? Just put it on the cloud.

      Signed,

      Web 2.0 Dev

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    2. Re: The BBC Tech folks are clueless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea these old hipsters. Mainframes aren't web scale. You know what is web scale?

      You know, I don't have to say it. ;)

  4. cash dispensing is not the business of banks by sittingnut · · Score: 1, Informative

    unlike what is implied here, main business of banks is extending credit (iow loaning money)at interest. money obtained through variety of means, mainly deposits.
    and loaning money can be only partially subjected to automation, and usually require lot of human interactions and long term relationships, and lots of specific customization. that is why small banks and banks branches still continue to exist .

    that is also why technology wont make banks obsolete anytime soon. if bank lose deposit taking due to technology ( a very huge if), they will get the money for loans from those who replaced they in that business.
     

  5. Clueless? by Bruce66423 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Really? You Sure? I've a friend who has worked two UK banks and would definitely agree.

    1. Re:Clueless? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "My friend would agree" gets a +5 Insightful? WTF?

  6. bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually pretty much most of the large banking computer network crashes the BBC are refering to in this article can be traced to the backoffice and maintenance of the systems being outsourced to India from the UK less than 8 months or so earlier and the whole way its been approached (to save money by offshoring skilled labour to where its percieved to be cheaper).
    So banking, long term systems with ultra stable operation, outsourced maintenance, fire all the people who know the systems, dont get reasonable knowledge transfer because of the scummy way it has been managed, and 6 months later find your core business reliant on that infrastructure goes to shit. Sending inter bank transfers on a schedule into swift has little to do with this and is just a excuse being trotted out to cover up the whole shitstorm created by mis-management.

    Disclaimer, I work in large corporate areas in the UK and have had a birds eye view of the farce.

    1. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Would using Rust help?

    2. Re: bollocks by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Not at all.

    3. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can you please give an explanation instead of just naysaying? If you can't contribute something useful to our discussion then maybe you shouldn't write anything at all.

    4. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe you should refrain from mentioning toy / fringe languages in a subject related to tried and tested systems? If you don't know what you are talking about, don't try to champion flavour of the week for the world's crucial systems. You are the one that is supposed to put forward peer reviewed test studies to justify your preposterous proposal, not just meekly suggest Rust. Go back to the Daily Mail.

    5. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe you haven't heard about Rust? It's a mature programming language created by Mozilla. They are using it for their next generation browser engine, Servo. It isn't a toy because some of the brightest minds the industry has ever seen are working on it. It is focused on security, reliability and trustworthiness. Rust is what all programming languages should strive to be like.

    6. Re:bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So banking, long term systems with ultra stable operation, outsourced maintenance, fire all the people who know the systems, dont get reasonable knowledge transfer because of the scummy way it has been managed, and 6 months later find your core business reliant on that infrastructure goes to shit.

      Unfortunately, even accounting for the cost of the system going to shit, it may *still* comes out cheaper for the bank, it just take a few more years for ROI. This kind of outsourcing will continue until the world ran out of places that are filled with people who are poor but has IT skills.

    7. Re: bollocks by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Maybe we have heard about Rust and dismiss it as a toy / fringe language that hasn't replaced anything.

    8. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not unless you think the mba mindset is down to a lack of iron in their diet and you plan on feeding them it.

    9. Re: bollocks by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

      Maybe we have heard about Rust and dismiss it as a toy / fringe language that hasn't replaced anything.

      Exactly. But the real question that no one has addressed is why is Russia (under Putin's direction) trying to infiltrate Rust into the lives of everyday, patriotic Americans and why is he trying to make our sacred banking system (inspired by the One True God) dependent on this communist-supported language? And why can't we put metal in a microwave?

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    10. Re: bollocks by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      Oh, Mozilla? That changes EVERYTHING! After all, a language designed to create a browser engine must be 100% ideal for heavy, back-end servers in the financial markets. It changes EVERYTHING!

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    11. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's Web scale. Mainframes aren't web scale.
      Get wit the times loser :P

    12. Re: bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      +1 insightful! It's clear just from the name that it is an attempt at a RUSsian Takeover!

    13. Re: bollocks by KGIII · · Score: 1

      But of course. They should rewrite their code every time a new fad language comes about and claims to resolve the ills of the old while not inserting any new problems. I sold and retired but I'm damned glad I didn't have any idiots like that. See, we *did* rewrite in a 'new' language.

      I'd written the original in C. We rewrote it in C++. By we I mean they but we as a company. I did a bunch of research and even audited a class in C++ before deciding to let them go ahead with it. In my case, it wasn't because it was a fad language but because it brought benefits to the table and we could keep the existing code and just upgrade it as needed/time allowed. It also happened that this was around the time where I'd really figured out that I'd hired these people because they were better at it than I was and I was unable to take it further or to the places where I wanted it to go. I needed real professionals for that.

      So, while we did change (and sort of rewrite) it was not to be fashionable, trendy, and had real benefits. It also happens that the idea to rewrite in C++ had already popped up a few times, I'd actually asked if it might be a worthwhile choice based on some materials that I'd read, and the entire (as in every last one) team was in favor of it.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  7. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Banks don't lend the money you deposit. That's YOUR money, not the bank's. Banks create the money they lend (out of nothing).

  8. No, not really. Just like the Neanderthals... by EzInKy · · Score: 1

    ...those banks with the strongest DNA will preserve a portion of their genome for future generations. Those who aren't willing to share will of course be destined to the dustbin of history, but those who are willing to open up their secret sauce stand a good chance of passing off part of their essence for perpetuity.

    --
    Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
  9. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    False. If that were true, the FDIC (and equivalent entities in other countries) wouldn't be necessary. You wouldn't earn interest on money in your accounts. Banks would have massive cash reserves but wouldn't be very profitable and would have a much harder time extending credit. Much of your money is invested in securities and loans.

  10. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by sittingnut · · Score: 4, Insightful

    no banks do lend the money they get from deposits.
    creation of money happens when this process continues-
    X deposits $100. bank after keeping (say) $10 due to statutory requirements, lend $90 of that. Y who got it(either from bank or after transactions from persons who got it from bank) then deposits $90 in another bank. that bank keeping $9 for statutory requirements lend $81. and this goes on. so from that $100 banking system create another $800(if statutory requirement is 10%). that is what is meant by creating money by banks.

  11. Housing Ponzi Scheme by monkeyxpress · · Score: 2

    Banks don't lend the money you deposit. That's YOUR money, not the bank's. Banks create the money they lend (out of nothing).

    No that is what central banks do. Banks do lend you money from deposits, but guess what the people who you pay that lent money to do with it? They deposit it again. In a bank. Which means the bank can lend it out again, and again, and again.

    It's really quite ingeniously stupid:

    1. In an area there are three houses, and three people - Alice, Bob and Mary. Mary owns her house, which she bought for $100k with a $10k deposit. The rest just rent.

    2. Bob and Alice both want to buy a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are worth $100k based on Mary's original purchase. They are prepared to lend each one $90k. At the auction, Bob is able to outbid Alice because he has saved a bigger deposit. He ends up paying $110k for the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $90k loan by selling the house for $100k if Bob defaults.

    3. Mary receives the $110k from Bob, uses it to pay down her mortgage of $90k, and deposits the remaining $20k with the bank. She thinks she did pretty well making $10k off her housing investment.

    4. A little while later Mary changes her mind and decides that she wants to buy her house again. Now both her and Alice are in the market for a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are now worth $110k, based on Bob's purchase price. They are prepared to lend each one $99k. At the auction, however, Alice is now desperate for a house. Even though Mary has the money she made from the previous house, Alice has saved hard and is able to scrape together enough for a $120k bid. She wins the auction and buys the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $99k loan by selling the house for $110k if Alice defaults.

    4. Bob is overjoyed. He just made $10k from his housing investment. Alice raises the mortage, and pays Bob. He pays down his $90k mortgage and puts his $30k into the bank.

    5. Bob then tells Mary she needs to just get into the market and buy because prices are going up so fast. Mary has already made money from housing, so she agrees. Alice hears how much Bob and Mary have made in the housing market, so she looks at buying an investment property. They all go off to the bank again...

    1. Re:Housing Ponzi Scheme by Krishnoid · · Score: 2

      2b. Some acceptably-written banter passes between Bob and Alice at the auction, and sparks fly.

      ...

      6. Mary and Alice meet at the bank and realize they've actually loved each other all along.

      7. Bob gets jealous, but tries to be the better person, and wishes them both well. Mary and Alice think about it and then make him part of the wedding party.

      8. Mary and Alice have a nice wedding, and Bob meets someone there, setting things up for the sequel.

      9. End Credits.

      10. Credits from end are reissued as a debt note, and process restarts.

      I think it could work with a little marketing. Maybe you could Kickstarter it?

    2. Re:Housing Ponzi Scheme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where is Eve in all this?

    3. Re:Housing Ponzi Scheme by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      I was actually expecting Carol and Ted to show up.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  12. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by geoff_smith82 · · Score: 1

    Banks do create money.. Read it straight from the Bank of England!

    http://www.bankofengland.co.uk...

  13. About par for the BBC by Archtech · · Score: 5, Informative

    This article is just about what I would expect from the BBC. Apparently the writer has no domain knowledge or experience of his own, so he relies entirely on what a number of different people (some of them self-seeking) see fit to tell him. Then he tries to fit the pieces together, like a rather slow child attempting a jigsaw puzzle.

    1. The title "Is old tech putting banks under threat of extinction?" is precisely the wrong way round. As we can all see, "old tech" has stood the banks in good stead and enabled them to run continuously and fairly reliably for 60 years or more. It's the addition of "new tech", and changes in the business, that add the risks.

    2. '"For the next five years - and we're talking globally - every incumbent banking player who's been around for a while will have an increased risk of outages," says Julian Skan, managing director of financial services at consultancy Accenture'. The journalist adds no comment or criticism, because Accenture is entirely authoritative and reliable. For anyone who remembers that far back, "Accenture began as the business and technology consulting division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The new name, as far as I know, was deemed necessary to escape from the appalling connotations of "Arthur Andersen". The interesting thing about the quotation is that it gives no reason for the alleged increased risk of outages.

    3. Next, under the heading "Legacy issue", we are informed that 'The problem is that the old mainframe computers - the workhorses of the global banking industry - have been chugging away keeping tabs on all our transactions for decades now. They're slow and reliable'. There are only two glaring, outrageous mistakes in this. First, the "old mainframe computers" themselves do not pose any problem at all. Second, they are very reliable but absolutely not slow. No doubt Matthew Wall has some dim idea that the same mainframes have been chugging away for 60 years, but surprise! IBM and others have continually upgraded their mainframes, and those of today are among the fastest and most powerful computers on the market. The IBM guideline for mainframe response time used to be half a second - with up to 1 or even 2 seconds allowed where the mainframe was remote (in one case, users in Australia were getting a 2-second response time from a mainframe in London). As today's mainframes are much more powerful, and comms are quicker, I can't see that this response time expectation should have changed much. In fact, it is Windows machines and even Unix servers that are much slower and less consistent in the response time they give. Since mainframes were designed, along with their tightly integrated software such as IMS and CICS, to handle transactions at the fastest possible rate, they are far more efficient at this kind of work than any other computers - which is why the predictions, starting before 1990, of the mainframe's demise have never materialized. Oh, and Matthew - "The definition of 'a legacy system' is one that works".

    4. "But the world has changed. We've gone mobile and online. We expect real-time transactions and access to financial services around the clock". And mainframes obviously provide the best possible back-end support for those requirements (which aren't really new anyway - 24-hour ATMs have been around for decades, and going "mobile" doesn't make any difference to banking systems).

    5. "The new computer systems and programming languages designed to cope with this fundamental shift in our behaviour don't interact well with the old, slower back-office systems". This sentence is so wholly and inherently wrong that's it's quite hard to pick out the individual wrong ideas from the overall mess. The "new systems and programming languages" (whatever they may be - we are not told) were not designed to cope with "going mobile and online". They were partly designed to make computing (and especially software development) cheaper and more flexible,

    --
    I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    1. Re: About par for the BBC by cyber-vandal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Microsoft Azure cloud comment did make me laugh but if you think bank systems are well designed I've got a bridge to sell you.

      IBM's architecture is solid but the banks have 40-50 years of terrible ideas and shit code held together with duct tape and chewing gum.

      As it gets harder to find COBOL developers because people like me were discarded for having the nerve to want to be paid well we're going to start seeing some serious banking problems as a lack of staff forces system upgrades.

      Either that or the banks will need to offer us huge incentives to come back much like they had to when the Y2K bug could no longer be ignored and they'd "rightsized" too many people.

    2. Re: About par for the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why should banks pay people like you well when you, in your own words, created systems that were "shit code held together with duct tape and chewing gum"?

    3. Re: About par for the BBC by Archtech · · Score: 3, Insightful

      IBM's architecture is solid but the banks have 40-50 years of terrible ideas and shit code held together with duct tape and chewing gum.

      Fair enough; I admit my knowledge is more of the systems and software than of the applications the banks have written. But Wall had nothing to say about the bank applications and their quality. I addressed the issues he did seem to touch on.

      As it gets harder to find COBOL developers because people like me were discarded for having the nerve to want to be paid well we're going to start seeing some serious banking problems as a lack of staff forces system upgrades.

      Yes, I can well believe that. The technical problems are rarely insoluble - whether it's a banking system or the Space Shuttle. It's the failure of executives and other decision-makers the understand computing that causes most of the trouble. I once met an IT recruitment company CEO who, quite seriously, told me that programmers were "like bricklayers". In other words, the difficult part was done by analysts and the like, and the programmers simply had to "code up" their designs. I managed to refrain from assaulting him, although it was difficult. FWIW, in my opinion it's more accurate to compare programmers to lawyers (at a coarse level, in terms of the difficulty, level of abstraction and appropriate pay level). But then lawyers are paid to obfuscate and confuse matters, whereas programmers do the opposite. No contest.

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    4. Re: About par for the BBC by Archtech · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Either that or the banks will need to offer us huge incentives to come back much like they had to when the Y2K bug could no longer be ignored and they'd "rightsized" too many people.

      But the difficulties of completely redesigning and reimplementing all those systems would make the Y2K bug look like just that - a tiny bug. When writing about that issue in about 1998 I asked Jerry Weinberg when he had first come across it. He replied that he had been warning management about the Y2K issue from the 1970s on.

      If businesses were to focus on a core competency - the way Unix software tools are supposed to - their IT problems would automatically be greatly reduced. And if banks went back to being banks, instead of a cross between casinos and lunatic asylums, they would also have less trouble of that kind. But then it would take at least ten years to become a billionaire - and who can wait that long?

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    5. Re: About par for the BBC by cyber-vandal · · Score: 4, Informative

      I was one if the younger ones who had to come into that environment and figure it out. Banking code is a mess due to politics, poor decision making and fear of touching someone else's badly written code that somehow works with a liberal spicing of some staff who have always been shit but good at bullshitting. In response to this the banks decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and it's going come back and bite them very hard. Similar patterns are being repeated with the more modern code I work with now.

    6. Re: About par for the BBC by Fnord666 · · Score: 1

      As it gets harder to find COBOL developers because people like me were discarded for having the nerve to want to be paid well we're going to start seeing some serious banking problems as a lack of staff forces system upgrades.

      Either that or the banks will need to offer us huge incentives to come back much like they had to when the Y2K bug could no longer be ignored and they'd "rightsized" too many people.

      Don't worry. A quick call to TCS and the bank will be assured that they have many fine developers skilled in COBOL that can do the needful.

      --
      'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
    7. Re: About par for the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like the way you added "needful", until that word I wasn't sure if you meant it or was just doing a really subtle joke.
      I see so many emails with "can someone do the needful" from offshore teams when really theyre saying "we don't have a clue what to do here, can someone bale us out" I know it was a joke :)

    8. Re:About par for the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a former MVS syst. Eng. and application developer , I couldn't agree more. I was still active when IBM integrated TCP/IP in OS390 ( 2.5 ?) and the technology provided was just the better IP technology for servers bar none.
      What I think the BBC guy tried to develop here, is an objective and topical fear from bankers to be "Uberized" by newcomers (EU investments in newtech banking tech is about 1.2B€ Y) and the common idea that it's because of technology, because smartphones make people smarter and new stuff makes new life and so on. The real problem raised by different studies (Bain's and some others) is that legacy banking is judged defavorably by more and more demanding customers at the precise time banks try to restore profitability through charging customers. Nothing to do with "old" technology, just a business model at risk.

    9. Re:About par for the BBC by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If they've been chugging along for 60 years they must be slow, or they'd have finished by now!

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    10. Re: About par for the BBC by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      the difficulties of completely redesigning and reimplementing all those systems would make the Y2K bug look like just that - a tiny bug.

      Probably correct - or more organisations would have taken the "build a new one that's shiny with stripes" option.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    11. Re:About par for the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      x1000!

      Best response yet.

      Our firm is paralyzed because the old hats are dying/retiring and middle management never invested in or trained there replacements. Now the current leadership is jawboning about the "problems" of "old mainframe" technology, etc. Despite their cackling, none of them have the balls to unplug that mainframe or sign their name on the project to replace it.

    12. Re:About par for the BBC by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Oh, and Matthew - "The definition of 'a legacy system' is one that works".

      That, that right there was beautiful. I'm going to say, "for some definition of works." However, that's a topic for another day.

      I love a good novella - more so when it's one that is spot on and written by someone other than I.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    13. Re: About par for the BBC by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Hmm... You wrote, "bale us out." Really? From reading your post, it looks like that wasn't said for ironic reasons. I'm pretty sure you mean 'bail.' Unless you've somehow twisted the adage to have something to do with bundling together a bunch of stuff, such as cotton or hay, then I'm pretty sure the word you're looking for is 'bail.' Like one bails someone out of jail, hot water, or a sinking boat. Perhaps you were too busy worried about others doing the needful and didn't have time to attend to your own problems.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    14. Re: About par for the BBC by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      told me that programmers were "like bricklayers". In other words, the difficult part was done by analysts and the like, and the programmers simply had to "code up" their designs.

      That depends on how the organization is set up. It is possible for analysts to write up detailed specifications so that programmers only have to follow instructions, but in practice it's far more give and take because writing good specs is hard, and because there will be surprises.

      Thus, it takes programming knowledge on the analysts side and analyst skills on the programming side to weave it all together.

    15. Re:About par for the BBC by dhaen · · Score: 1

      Interestingly the article links to two startups, who presumably will have got a lot of hits.

    16. Re: About par for the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If only life was so clear cut in the er... english version of english. I meant it in the "can you bundle this problem into a lump and take ownership of it making it not our problem on the tracking sheets and metrics counts", not in the "our boat is sinking with the weight of this problem, can you help remove the water" sense.
      http://www.dailywritingtips.com/bail-out-vs-bale-out/

      Perhaps I had time, I just wasn't dumbing down my phrasology to the international version so a wider audience could understand the nuances.

    17. Re: About par for the BBC by treethought · · Score: 1

      ... it's going come back and bite them very hard.

      No, banks will make sure it bites us, not them.

    18. Re: About par for the BBC by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      Not if they have huge problems that send customers to more nimble rivals.

    19. Re: About par for the BBC by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      If there's a set of specs that the programmers need only implement, those specs constitute a program written by the analysts, the difference being they don't have good feedback on whether the specs make sense. The programmers get a bad program as specs for a good one, and are (in my experience) expected to produce a good program that works according to the design, despite not knowing the design.

      As a development methodology, this sucks.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    20. Re: About par for the BBC by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      It's like the analysts produce sloppy pseudo-code or an equivalent and the programmers then have to find a way to turn that into concrete code. That's often not trivial such that the programmers are doing a degree of "analysis", and that's why it's often not cookie-cutter.

      If the analysts *did* produce sufficiently "tight" specs, then that spec indeed might as well be a program such you don't need a middle-person programmer. But that puts a lot of burden on the analyst, who essentially is then a programmer/analyst.

      But for larger projects it's usually best to let analysts focus on business/domain logic and programmers focus on the lower-level guts of getting it to run in practice, working around goofy bugs in the libraries/API's, and communicating ambiguities to analysts. Both positions require skill and experience to do WELL.

  14. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Archtech · · Score: 0

    You may be interested to know that, legally, as soon as you deposit your money it belongs to the bank. In return, the bank now owes you money - but if it goes out of business, your debt comes way, way down the list of debts to be repaid. After, for instance, losses incurred trading in derivatives.

    --
    I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
  15. Somebody just doesn't know what "crashed". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The old mainframe didn't crash.

    It was the "new and improved" processing that crashed.

    The slot that didn't dispense money crashed. Or the new network router.

    Not the bank central processing.

  16. No. by Required+Snark · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Next question?

    --
    Why is Snark Required?
  17. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by cyber-vandal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Luckily various governments thought of that and guarantee deposits up to a certain amount.

  18. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by monkeyxpress · · Score: 1

    In the UK there is no such requirement, and in the US it only applies to deposits in transaction accounts. It really ceased being a constraint a long time ago, because central banks must allow money creation to account for the needs of a growing economy, but they really have no useful way to know whether the money banks are asking for is going into bubbles or legitimate requirements. For this reason they just target inflation, which does not account for asset bubbles caused excess funds flooding a market.

    Also, hedge funds and private investment banks are not constrained by these sorts of rules. If they believe they can profit by pumping up a market, they are free to do so. As Soros showed, if you are big enough, you can control the market, and make your own 'luck'.

  19. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by sittingnut · · Score: 1

    i grant that statutory requirements has ceased to matter in some countries. however money creation is still the same process; with a 0% requirement $100 would create $900 by banking system, instead of $800 with 10%.
    throughout money creation by banking system as a whole, each individual bank would have loans equaling deposits.
    all one has to do is examine balance sheets of commercial banks, there
    deposits+loans from central bank and other banks+capital = loans+statutory requirements + other assets( buildings etc)
    and two biggest items would be deposits and loans, which would be roughly equal.

  20. One can only hope. by Lumpy · · Score: 0

    Banks are one thing that society can do without. They are now corrupt and designed to be predatory.

    If something happens to eliminate banks, I would have a party in it's honour.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:One can only hope. by sumdumass · · Score: 1

      Society cannot do without banks. If banks were eliminated tomorrow, there would be business popping up all over the place doing similar things banks do even if you called them something else. People need to make money and the aggregation of money easily and safely portable and people need loans. It's even more important with international trade.

  21. Yeesh by markdavis · · Score: 1

    >"You put your card in the cash machine but nothing comes out. The bank's IT systems have crashed again. But you need money fast, so what do you do?"

    You wait until it is back up in a few hours or try tomorrow because you are not stupid enough to run COMPLETELY out of cash before going to get more. It is called "responsibility".

    1. Re:Yeesh by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 1

      >"You put your card in the cash machine but nothing comes out. The bank's IT systems have crashed again. But you need money fast, so what do you do?"

      You wait until it is back up in a few hours or try tomorrow because you are not stupid enough to run COMPLETELY out of cash before going to get more. It is called "responsibility".

      Replace 'cash machine' with 'gas pump' in this scenario and things look a little more bleak to that individual. Many people simply don't carry cash anymore. They also don't get to learn the value of a dollar since all they ever see are numbers on a screen. But that doesn't really matter to them since they already have that big student loan debt that follows them for life.

    2. Re:Yeesh by Firethorn · · Score: 1

      They also don't get to learn the value of a dollar since all they ever see are numbers on a screen.

      I disagree. As a small child it took a while for me to realize the value behind those pieces of paper and bits of metal. A little bit of gaming as they grow up and they'll understand those numbers very well indeed.

      --
      I don't read AC A human right
    3. Re:Yeesh by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Replace 'cash machine' with 'gas pump' in this scenario and things look a little more bleak to that individual. Many people simply don't carry cash anymore.

      I haven't paid cash for gas in years - groceries either, unless you count walking into a convenience store and buying a candy bar.

      That said, I've been in stores when their purchasing systems are down, and they have always had some sort of fallback plan which still didn't require the use of cash. There's never been a time I couldn't make the purchase I wanted.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    4. Re:Yeesh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, numbers on a screen or numbers on a page, same thing really. The value of a dollar isn't in the bill itself.

  22. The tech is not the biggest problem by damn_registrars · · Score: 1

    The bigger problem with the banks right now is that it is nearly impossible to get a savings account (or CD) that has an interest rate above the inflation rate. If the banks can't provide an incentive for people to keep their money there, then why would people do it? Sure a lot of people don't want to carry large amounts of money on them regularly, but most people don't need a large amount of money on them at any given time. They can keep the rest under the mattress and do just as well.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:The tech is not the biggest problem by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      Why borrow from depositors at interest rates that are higher than the central banks will loan? If I have to pay Joe Average 3% on his money that I'm using (and I can't use all of it, anyway), but only 0.25% on money I can get from the central bank (and can use all of it), why pay Joe? In fact, I'll pay him a pittance just to keep him around (it's better than nothing, right?) because maybe I can sell him a credit card account or mortgage and make some more money off of him - after all, I'm awash in the nearly-free money I got from the central bank!

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    2. Re:The tech is not the biggest problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bank interest is almost NEVER above the inflation rate, unless by some accident you have a term account that pays a rate set before they all dropped. They can't pay such rates consistently, because changes to their sources of income (yes, primarily interest charged on loans for actual Banks, not investment companies that happen to have a branch that takes deposits) almost always lag behind the actual inflation rate. They have to pay you much less than they charge others to have a margin. Remember, when you deposit money in a bank (or credit union, for that matter), you're LOANING YOUR MONEY to the institution so they have capital to support their loans. Banks basically depend on their customers for venture capital.

      The problem these days is that inflation is low. Is that a problem? Not for consumers, but if you're loaning your money to a bank it's a problem because they can't pay you much more than zero interest. In fact, it might be less than zero after you add the various fees that magically appear from time to time. So yes, it might be better to keep money in mattress and own things. But it's much more convenient to have the money in a bank where you can access it with a card. So the bank's systems have to keep working, whether coded in COBOL, assembler, or Rust. The COBOL-based infrastructure is probably more reliable, still, than something cooked up in Rust by somebody who was a script kiddie only yesterday.

    3. Re:The tech is not the biggest problem by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      Depends on the time period. Twenty years ago all bank-accounts had interest above inflation.

      What has changed is that since the economic crisis in the early 2000 (after the dot-com crash). The official interest rates in most countries have been close to 0% to encourage growth. It hasn't worked but just caused more issues, and because we continue to have economic issues, and economists believe those can be slowed by low interest rates, we have been stuck with 0% interest for over a decade (which also means banks can loan below inflation).

    4. Re:The tech is not the biggest problem by KGIII · · Score: 1

      It also depends on where you do your banking and how much you're depositing into the institution. If you're depositing sums that greatly exceed the FDIC values, for example, you're going to get a different interest rate than the guy who saved up $25,000. If you're going with a private bank then you may get even higher rates.

      I do not know all the details about all the variations but there's more than one type of bank out there. When I sold my business, I was given access to a real person who was a financial advisor - by my bank and at no cost. They spent time coming to visit, answer questions, come talk, talk on the phone, etc... They were really handy to have and the bank provided their services as no cost for a month.

      Actually, I think they were available longer than a month but I only had enough questions to keep them busy for a month. I believe that they normally charged for the service but provided it at no cost initially. As I recall, they were going to start charging for it at some point but I didn't need the service beyond that. That would have been 2007 so I don't remember numbers and names but that's the gist of it. I have no idea if they typically give away such services but I was going to be moving a whole lot of money through them and they might have had a policy of offering such to people who were in that position.

      Today, other than private banking, I mostly use credit unions. I much prefer them and the services they provide. They too may opt to offer a larger interest rate that depends on the amount of money you have deposited there.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  23. The other way around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Banks are putting techies to extinction.

  24. Impossible to replace by flopsquad · · Score: 3, Insightful

    makes the old systems obsolete, but impossible to replace

    No. It may be (difficult | expensive | unprofitable | complex | a pain in the ass | a (herculean | sisyphean | Korean | Crimean | many eon | diahrrea'in) task), perhaps.

    But impossible? No.

    --
    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
    1. Re:Impossible to replace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot pyrrhic

  25. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If people removed their funds from their bank accounts today, there would be no banks next week. Governments block people from having access to their deposited funds when the shit hits the fan causing people start emptying their accounts. Although it's improbable to hit a westernised country, it happens enough in South America and former Eastern Bloc countries after the Soviet collapse. But you'll rarely hear about them, as they're regarded as peasant to the western media.

    Banks also steal money from deposits and shut up shop before disappearing overseas, where they repeat the process. 2008 should tell you all you need to know about this corrupt industry. ATMs are nothing to do with it, neither is so-called antiquated technology.

  26. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nope. Depositing money in a bank is the equivalent of giving them an unsecured loan. You may think of it as yours, but you've lost all control of it. If the bank doesn't want to pay it back by letting you "withdraw" it, you're pretty much screwed.

  27. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wrong

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  29. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Alumoi · · Score: 1

    It's your money UNTIL you make a deposit. After that the bank owes the money and lets you use them.

  30. In America by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In America people are so dependent on credit that the banks will never go away. Even if they returned to a paper only system people would put up with it just to be able to get the extra spending power that they desperately need to maintain their lifestyle obsession. All those people driving shiny new cars every year aren't paying for them with their deposit balances. The deposit system is just one part of the big banking system. Loans and credit cards are where they make their money and why people still put up with the obsolete tech and associated issues that surround it.

  31. Stop with the jokes already! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ""Everything is stored securely in the Microsoft Azure cloud"

    Ha ha ha, ow that hurts my ribs.

    Use of MS Azure is almost certainly a violation of the banking regs in one way or another, either through its lack of reliability or through its violation of the Data Protection Act (which forbids the transfer of personal data to computers outside the area covered by data protection legislation). Oh and please do NOT mention Safe Harbor provisions, or I really injure myself laughing.

  32. shells by umghhh · · Score: 1

    sea shells do not have layers of complexity problems albeit come to think of it the process leading to creation of shells took billions of years to establish smooth out.

  33. Cash? Who uses cash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I mean, really? Swipe, done. Tap, done. Scan, done.

    1. Re:Cash? Who uses cash? by dwye · · Score: 1

      And best of all, when THE STATE needs your money, they can just reset your accounts to whatever fraction of what you once had.

      Ask anyone from Cyprus.

  34. ToS reading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now, online access and the expectation that money will be immediately available

    Money transfers that go through the same day are those usually within the same bank. Those who read ToSes don't expect the unexpected with losses.

  35. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by rubycodez · · Score: 0

    false.

    with a 0% requirement a bank can create any amount of money.

  36. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    0% means creating ad infinitum.

  37. Replacing legacy mainframe systems by maple_shaft · · Score: 2

    As an architect designing a distributed horizontally scalable solution with commodity hardware to replace a legacy mainframe based system at a major US bank, I can attest to the near impossibility of such a feat. The problem is one of reprehensible management that silo themselves into little fiefdoms in there ever present quest to backstabbing their way up the corporate ladder. The culture in management is so hostile that positions for middle management are opening up and being offered to technical people like myself who are turning it down because who wants to eat shit and be in meetings for 70 hours a week for what, 10k more per year? No thanks, I actually like spending time with my family. Further still decades of offshoring and outsourcing have sufficiently hollowed out these organizations to the point where nobody knows, cares, or values doing the right thing. Most of the time they are substandard technical talent at best. Management couldn't buy a clue though they sure try. Everything some consultant comes in to look at stuff and offer advice, they are basically just put in charge of doing actual management. Literally you don't get much more hollow than making the consultant a bona fide manager. Really? You just wrote the vendor a blank check! Of course his management discretion will be to buy more and more products and services from his company, and bring more and more of his buddies into this gravy train. Then when it falls apart, consultant is kicked out and blamed for all the problems, then they cycle in the next company with a flashy PowerPoint and sales guys with a good golf swing. Then we have the problem of them not understanding IT in the slightest because they have been out of the technical game so long or they are an MBA suit. They don't understand how a successful project is run, what people are talented and which are good pretenders, and throw in buzz words they hear at a conference like, "Scrum" and "Agile" but then set it all up for failure by insisting on projects that are Fixed Date AND Fixed Scope! Seriously, when has that ever worked? Clearly not anytime in recent memory judging on maybe the single digits project success rate that you boast as an organization. Some messed up part of their mind believes that people work harder when you set a hard deadline and whip them. OK, I am not challenging the veracity of this, merely that hard work is what makes an IT project successful. No, careful methodical planning and diligent project management make an IT project successful. If we had all the answers and I had 10 really smart guys and full participation of interface teams, we could knock this out in 3 months. To get there requires a lot of analysis, design and planning though. Last I checked the project isn't failing because we don't have enough warm bodies banging on keyboards, it's because we can't get 40 teams to coordinate, we can't get the business to commit to scope, and requirements suck because you have been treating analysts like replaceable cogs for decades. No, the real goal isn't the project, it is to grow a team bigger than your colleague and have more face time with executives because ultimately that is what gives you advancement. This is the reason whyou these projects are seemingly impossible and almost always fail at the bank.

    1. Re:Replacing legacy mainframe systems by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 2

      No, I think the reason these projects almost always fail the bank is the architects of such systems don't understand basic grammar, like the use of paragraphs.

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    2. Re:Replacing legacy mainframe systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google 'paragraphs'.

    3. Re:Replacing legacy mainframe systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I blame lame standards. I'm sure when it was typed, it looked good. Then it got submitted, and the algorithms decided that, no, two newlines in a row doesn't really mean display a blank line, like humans have done since the beginning of typewriting.

    4. Re: Replacing legacy mainframe systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who gives a shit, everything he said is fucking true.

      Instead of being a smug prick, why not offer some counter points.

      People on /. Are so fucking childish. You aren't grading a fucking term paper, you are communicating on a forum.

    5. Re:Replacing legacy mainframe systems by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Google 'paragraphs'.

      You're behind the times. These days they'd call their new venture "Alphabet Paragraphs".

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    6. Re:Replacing legacy mainframe systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      After reading your article yes you really do work at the bank. Yes I worked at one of the largest backend services company for banks. Same thing 6 hour meetings over a vulnerability it would only take less than 30 mins. to fix. A data center with over 3 million vulnerabilities (yes that is 3,000,000 I am not kidding) on it and designed as a flat network where one can hop from bank to bank without any problem or security. I've worked in IT for over 20 years and have seen some cluster fucks but nothing to compare to my time at the bank. Biggest problem as you said management. People in charge of IT and security that wouldn't know a server if they tripped over it. People with MBAs in finance but not a clue on how a network works.

      After working on the bank for a month I pulled all my money out of my account and put the cash in a safety deposit box.

      You may think when you cash your check that your money is in that big old vault at the bank but I hate to tell you this but it is really most likely stored in a Windows 2003 server which hasn't been patched in 5 years. ( Write an Exception that will fix the vulnerability no need to patch)

      Like you said this article is about putting the blame somewhere else. The problem isn't old systems but bad management by people that live in the land of unicorns.

  38. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by sittingnut · · Score: 1

    in theory "with a 0% requirement a bank can create any amount of money", but since quite apart from salutatory requirements, a banks has to hold on to some of the deposits to cover daily withdrawals of deposits (usually less than 5% of total ) bank can never loan the full amount of deposits, people, and i here, use salutatory requirement percentage in explaining this process because it is usually the bigger.

  39. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    You are 100% wrong. Banks do not lend from reserves. Here is the Bank of England - the UK central bank - stating this: "...the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions - banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they 'multiply up' central bank money to create new loans and deposits"

  40. disappointing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I figured that banks kept using the old and reliable mainframes, because they worked very reliably. I also assumed that banks had very expensive senior devs, whom got paid lots of money, to produce very reliable code. I also assumed the banks had a next generation software for unix variant servers under development.

  41. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by MrLogic17 · · Score: 1

    Sounds like someone hasn't watched "It's a Wonderful Life".
    Aside from being a sappy Christmas movie, it also tells the fundamentals of how banks work.

    Why else would everyone withdrawing their money at once (aka a run on a bank) cause it to collapse?

  42. What I'm going to do by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    is use one of the 5 other Credit Cards I have that have lines of credit available that route through a different network. Worst case scenario I pay an extra 2% to borrow the cash for a few days. I'm also going to plan my purchases and bill payments around bank systems crashing and occasionally argue with customer service to get a late fee waived when they couldn't automatically bill my bank account and I didn't notice until I got a text message & and email telling me I'm over due. And because I'm a good (profitable) customer they'll waive the fee.

    See, this is only a problem for poor people living paycheck to paycheck without any lines of credit. While it's true 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck most of them have a few lines of credit to patch this up (though at high interest). But for guys like me that are doing so-so (enough money in bank for a few months bills and lots and lots of credit) it's at worst a minor inconvenience.

    Now, for the bottom 20% who have shit credit, no savings and shit jobs they are screwed. But we've never cared about them before, why start now?

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  43. The trouble with the mainframes by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    is two fold. First, the Indians know Java, and most of the mainframe code is Cobol. if you want cheap programmers you have to start moving it to Java. Plus the old Cobol programmers are dying/retiring and companies in America are loath to train. Half the reason they want the Indians is their trained overseas for peanuts on their own dime.

    The other problem is they were built and their software written when space was at an absolute premium. Some of the systems can't handle the really large transactions banks and B2B customers want to do. They'll max out at 9,999,999 or so when $100 million transactions are standard and billion dollar ones not far off. Plus they're terrible at sending through complex invoice data. They can do it, but it's usually EDI which is a mess. If you've ever seen an EDI spec doc (or beaten a Zombie to death with one) you know what I mean.

    Why is that such a problem? Because accounting automation is the next big thing. Businesses do a thing called 'reconciliation' where they track everything they sold, for how much and then compare it to the bank statements. This way they don't wake up one day to find they've been giving stuff away for free for a year and lost millions. In a big company it happens all the time because your rank and file peon doesn't care of the mega corp gets paid. If the checks stop coming from Company A they'll go work for Company B. Same shit, different master. But you better believe Company A cares :P.

    Believe it or not right now that reconciliation is largely manual because banks suck at handling data. Updating their systems will fix that.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:The trouble with the mainframes by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I can't be the last old-guy here. I've seen it throughout the thread so you're not alone. It's COBOL. It stands for something like COmmon Business Oriented Language. Something like that, at any rate. I played with it years and years ago - actually after I'd played with BASIC. I want to say that I played with it in about 1987 or 1988.

      I don't remember what it was about it that I didn't like but the fact remains that I didn't like it. I think it was that it was tough to read, as a human, that made me dislike it so much. I do seem to recall that that problem sort of started to go away as I used it more frequently. However, it never really went away - which might say more about me than it does about the language, and I'm okay with that.

      C was a bit like that. C++ was less like that but I'd been reading C for a while. While not really the same, I do okay at 'reading' PHP. PERL doesn't even need obfuscation. As an aside; I'm not sure about spelling it Perl or PERL. It's usually spelled Perl but it's an acronym for something or other.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    2. Re:The trouble with the mainframes by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Perl is the language, and I think PERL is the compiler/interpreter, hence "only PERL can parse Perl". It's not an acronym, although it's received a couple of backronyms: "Practical Extraction and Report Language" and "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister".

      It is possible to write understandable and maintainable Perl, but not everybody does so.

      COBOL was one of the earlier attempts at eliminating programmers by providing a language even managers could understand. Like other such attempts, it failed. It was designed so that something like "MULTIPLY DOLLAR-AMOUNT OF INVOICE GIVING DISCOUNT OF INVOICE." would make sense, at the expense of things like, say, functions, local variables, and easy-to-implement control flow ("PERFORM PARAGRAPH-1 THRU PARAGRAPH-3." and "PERFORM PARAGRAPH-2 THRU PARAGRAPH-4." were legal, and made simple sequential code complicate).

      There's no problem with COBOL not handling large numbers, per se. The trick is that the number of decimal digits was specified in the DATA DIVISION, something like "05 ORDER-AMOUNT PIC 9(6)V99.", which would declare a variable with six digits to the left of the decimal point. Suppose you wanted to change that to nine digits: you'd have to change the PIC clause on every program it was used in, and have some way to deal with old and new files. If you missed the change in one intermediate variable in one program in the process, COBOL would drop the leftmost three digits quietly (been there, done that) and not give any clue that something might be wrong.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  44. Good! by DaMattster · · Score: 1

    Here's to hoping those bastions of evil go extinct!

  45. Survival is a powerful motivator by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 1

    Legacy hardware is really hard to move from. It can feel impossible at times. But survival is a powerful motivator.

    It's really, really expensive to move off old hardware, but it's not impossible. If it becomes a matter of life or death of the organization, things will get done. If they don't, the organization dies, and someone else steps in to fill the void. In that case, death was inevitable and necessary. The world does not end.

  46. The sky is not falling by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 1

    I've occasionally gone to an ATM that wasn't working. I've occasionally tried to log on to my bank's Web site, to find that the site was down. These events were annoying, but not catastrophic. I found another ATM, and waited a few minutes for the site to come back up.

    There is little evidence that things are getting worse. Quoting some guy at Accenture saying that it's getting worse, doesn't make it so. My experience is just the opposite--electronic and ATM transactions seem to be getting easier and more reliable, not less.

    Remember when you would go to the store, and the credit card machine wouldn't work because the store was receiving a fax on the same line, or was just out of order? When was the last time that happened to you? I'll bet it's been a while, at least, if you live in a first-world country.

  47. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lol, that article is misleading. I love the gems in there:

    "Deposits in banks are simply liabilities the bank owes, not assets to be lent out"

    "Not spending your money creates a liability for the bank"

    Despite the insistence of the author that the 'traditional' view of money creation is wrong, the whole article is basically saying precisely the same thing as the parent, just stated from a "different point of view". IMCO (inmycynicalopinion), someone who wants to put banks in a good light (and keep their power / job).

  48. Older than me by keysdisease · · Score: 1

    I worked on DDA at BofA at Market and Van Ness in '69. Data center is still there and they're still running DDA. Want to stay in business, never run out of lipstick.

  49. Really? by Bruce66423 · · Score: 1

    The assumption that people actually carry enough cash to pay for a tank load of petrol, especially in Europe where it's a lot more expensive because of higher taxation, is highly dubious. So when the bank refuses the cards of a lot of customers one day it's going to get ugly rather fast.

    This story makes the point

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...

    add in those who are on the bread line who can't afford to have that sort of amount of cash hanging around, and there's a big issue. As ever, those of us who are comfortable, have several credit cards and a reasonable credit card limit don't have a problem. But there's a lot of people who don't.

    1. Re:Really? by Firethorn · · Score: 1

      ... I think that you responded to the wrong post.

      I was saying that while a person needs to learn the value of 'money', whether it's physical or digital, understanding digital money is very much not beyond people growing up with smart phones, the internet, etc...

      Either that, or you missed the part I was responding to, which I quoted, and thus went off into the woods with your response to me, thinking I was talking about cash.

      The idea of keeping alternate methods of payment around is not a bad one. As an old timer, I have a debit card, several credit cards, and I usually have some cash on me, though it's generally not going to pay for more than a few meals or enough gas to get home and back to the gas station tomorrow.

      --
      I don't read AC A human right
  50. That's why people contract by Bruce66423 · · Score: 1

    Certainly in the UK, a awful lot of good people do contracting rather than sticking with one company. Your superb dissection of what's wrong helps me understand why! I hope your escape tunnel building is going well; by the sounds of it you need it.

  51. Oh no! What will I do? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

    But you need money fast, so what do you do?

    Um... don't live your life so close to the edge of an empty wallet? Carry a credit card? Any number of things, really, except relying on your bank's ATM to be your personal ATM - so to speak.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  52. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

    It happened in Greece as well - that's the EU. Limiting daily withdrawals to a pittance.

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  53. real time money is here now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and companies like Dwolla are at the forefront of working with banks to take the process of money movement to the 21st century.

    1. Re: real time money is here now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't a dwolla somebody who assists with births?

  54. What they'll do: by SvnLyrBrto · · Score: 1

    And it's already happening.

    They'll either fund or spin off new "hip and modern" banks targeted at urban millennials. These banks won't have branches. Everything will be done online. If you need cash, they'll have a relationship with the ATM networks that serve credit unions*, so as to cut down on the fees. But you won't want to use cash. You'll use your card for everything, because you'll get points and you'll automagically track all of your expenses into categories and budgets via their iPhone app. And said app will easily integrate into mint.com, unlike traditional banks whose connection into mint breaks down every other week. You probably won't even have a checkbook for your "checking" account. Because who writes checks anymore anyway? And because of the lack of overhead from maintaining branches and other legacy cruft, these new banks will have significantly lower fees, and give out lots of "free" stuff vs. the traditional banks.

    They start small, and are precisely targeted and marketed. So the initial capitalization can be modest. But most importantly, since they're starting fresh, they aren't encumbered by decrepit, 60-year-old, legacy COBOL. The backend systems won't be written in the latest trendy languages like node.js, go, or Swift... though the user-facing sites and apps may be... they'll be in something with a more solid foundation, but nevertheless still current and with a much larger talent pool, like C++ or even plain old vanilla C.

    As the bugs get worked out, and the new systems prove themselves, and the new banks scale up successfully; they'll eventually be acquired or folded back into the parent bank. They'll stop marketing exclusively to hip, urban, millennials and first bring more customers onto the "new banks" ("Now a JP Morgan Chase company.", with full access to the capital which that entails.). Then they'll build up the new backend and transition their existing customers over. And finally, they'll terminate the new bank branding ("But don't worry, all of the features you've come to know and love are still available to you** as a JP Morgan Chase customer! Only the name has changed. Plus, you can use every ATM in the Chase*** network. And you now have the option of visiting any of out JP Morgan Chase branches**** for your banking needs!")

    * Some of these "new banks" will actually *BE* credit unions, instead of "banks". Even the fairly well-established credit unions tend to already be significantly ahead of the curve versus banks.

    ** Additional fees may apply.

    *** A $3 fee will apply per withdrawal. Additionally, there will be a $4 fee for using an ATM outside the Chase network.

    **** Additional fees may apply.

    --
    Imagine all the people...
  55. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    no banks do lend the money they get from deposits.
    creation of money happens when this process continues-
    X deposits $100. bank after keeping (say) $10 due to statutory requirements, lend $90 of that. Y who got it(either from bank or after transactions from persons who got it from bank) then deposits $90 in another bank. that bank keeping $9 for statutory requirements lend $81. and this goes on. so from that $100 banking system create another $800(if statutory requirement is 10%). that is what is meant by creating money by banks.

    That doesn't create money, it just puts money into circulation that wouldn't otherwise be. If I let other people drive my car as long as it's available to me whenever I want, we're not making more cars, we're using the ones we have more efficiently.

  56. Re: bollocks (Your .sig claim#2) by dwye · · Score: 1

    My Sig spits 40 cal lead... I ignore ACs - be a grown-up, show who you are.

    To which non-AC post were you replying?

    I assume the AC post asking "Would using Rust help?" was making a joke, like asking about using a beowulf cluster back in the good old days, and it just went completely over posters' heads. The alternative is too disappointing to bear.

  57. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... guarantee deposits up to a certain amount.

    The government once again, assuming the losses of private businesses. Every half-century there's a push for banks to fund their own insurance but making banks hold a cash reserve they can't touch annoys the hell out of them so they get the laws removed.

  58. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You are precisely wrong that the Bank of England says anything even remotely resembling what the parent says

    The parent post says this:
    "no banks do lend the money they get from deposits"

    The Bank of England says:
    "banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them"

    That is a direct contradiction of the parent post.

  59. Insert free slashvertisment for Microsoft by khz6955 · · Score: 1

    "Everything is stored securely in the Microsoft Azure cloud and even our loan agreements are signed electronically, handled by Docusign."

    The solution is obvious, the banks should put all their backend processes on the industry standard Microsoft Azure cloud :)

  60. Bank Tech is Burning Me Right Now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Long story short I'm in the middle of a life transition and wanted to calculate a few things this weekend. My bank recently changed their login system and it's riddled with bugs. As a result I can't login to view my balance on my accounts and loans. I feel like Slashdot wrote this article for me personally. Are you guys hiding in the bushes across the street or something?

  61. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by aplcomp · · Score: 1

    Money can be created without a bank, like this: A businessman enters a hotel and pays for a room 100$ The receptionist escorts the businessman into his room Meanwhile, the hotel accountant pays hotel's debt to the local gas station, total 100$ Gas station entrepreneur pays his debt to the local whore, total 100$ The whore pays her debt to hotel, total 100$ The businessman is not happy with his room, and he is returned the deposited 100$.

  62. Simple solution... by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

    The premise: "You put your card in the cash machine but nothing comes out. The bank's IT systems have crashed again. But you need money fast, so what do you do?

    You go to the stash of cash that you have, which is twice your anticipated daily requirement and start to use that.

    What's that, Lassie? Someone doesn't think ahead? Do they have a Darwin Award, yet?

    --
    Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    1. Re:Simple solution... by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately, the unforeseen circumstance that caused this requires three or four times your anticipated daily requirement of cash. Perhaps your car was towed (whether you are at fault or not).

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    2. Re:Simple solution... by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      Damned good reason for not having a car. Stops it getting towed.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  63. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The main lending limit actually is "Basel III", a set of international regulations which apply in the UK as well. This limits the outstanding loans, not by fraction of the savings & deposits, but by the amount of (shareholder) capital. This is a good thing, because it's those shareholders which should be at risk when loans aren't repaid. The liquidity ratio is a bit less important because central banks can solve that particular problem by loaning cash to banks which need it - they can repay it later, when the longer-term loans are repaid.

    Hedge funds and other financial organizations aren't constrained by this, because the rules are conditions of a banking license. Financial activities that aren't banking simply do not require a banking license. "Investment banks" are the most difficult case, but there it's understood that the investors in those banks provide capital to the bank, not deposits.

  64. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Depends on the country. The Dijsselbloem rules in the EU, first tested in Cyprus, establish that deposits up to 100K are the first to be repaid. Conversely, the shareholders are the last to be repaid. This makes sense, because if it wasn't the bank repaying them first, then the national government would be on the hook to repay those accounts.

    Debts due to derivatives? They're not special; they go in the middle of the queue.

    That said, if you really want to avoid the bank counterparty risk, tell your bank to buy treasury bonds. Unlike money, the bank only acts as the safekeeper for bonds. You own them, and if the bank fails they remain your property. Downside: doesn't work too well in the EU and Japan, where interests have gone negative.

  65. Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You have it backwards. Loans create deposits, not the other way around.

    When a bank makes a loan no money is transferred from anyone's deposit account, and no check is performed to see if there are enough deposits to back the loan. The only consideration is the risk profile of the loan.

    When the loan is made, money is created in the borrowers account - it is not moved there from somewhere else. Typically the borrower then transfers this money into the account of whoever it is they are buying stuff from, and the flow of money continues from there.

    The Bank of England has an in depth article on their website explaining the process.