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...

Comments

Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks

[sittingnut]

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.

Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks

[cyber-vandal]

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

Re:the War on Cash

[arth1]

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.

Re:the War on Cash

[BitZtream]

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.