Is Old Tech Putting Banks Under Threat Of Extinction? (bbc.co.uk) 208
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...
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...
the War on Cash (Score:2)
Re:the War on Cash (Score:5, 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.
Re:the War on Cash (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.
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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.
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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.
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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 we
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 /. :-)
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That's actually a good argument for introducing random delays in transaction systems.
Re: the War on Cash (Score:2)
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.
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There are several. Top of the list is shooting down people looking to collect rent.
Re: the War on Cash (Score:2)
Ah, so it's about free stuff.
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Not that kind of rent. Look up economic rent.
Re: the War on Cash (Score:2)
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.
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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
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If you're going to troll, at least try to be a little less blatant.
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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!
Re:the War on Cash (Score:5, 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.
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"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-4qtr200
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Why do you hate Rust????
The real question is, "Why does Rust hate America?"
Re:the War on Cash (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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-initi
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[*]: 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.
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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.
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What is in it for the bank? How would they make money off of the float and cause insufficient funds charges?
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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.
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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.
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Re: the War on Cash (Score:2)
cash dispensing is not the business of banks (Score:2, 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 tech
Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks (Score:5, 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.
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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.
Al
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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
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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.
Housing Ponzi Scheme (Score:3)
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
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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
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I was actually expecting Carol and Ted to show up.
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It's your money UNTIL you make a deposit. After that the bank owes the money and lets you use them.
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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?
Re: cash dispensing is not the business of banks (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily various governments thought of that and guarantee deposits up to a certain amount.
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bollocks (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.
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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?
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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 i
Re: bollocks (Your .sig claim#2) (Score:2)
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.
About par for the BBC (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/... [wikipedia.org] 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,
Re: About par for the BBC (Score:4, 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.
Re: About par for the BBC (Score:4, 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.
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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 bein
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Probably correct - or more organisations would have taken the "build a new one that's shiny with stripes" option.
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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.
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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 p
Re: About par for the BBC (Score:5, 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.
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If they've been chugging along for 60 years they must be slow, or they'd have finished by now!
The trouble with the mainframes (Score:2)
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 ba
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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 i
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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.
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No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeesh (Score:2)
>"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".
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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.
Really? (Score:2)
This story makes the point
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi... [bbc.co.uk]
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 wh
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... 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 ol
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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.
The tech is not the biggest problem (Score:2)
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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 ba
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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
Impossible to replace (Score:4, 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.
Replacing legacy mainframe systems (Score:3)
That's why people contract (Score:2)
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Google 'paragraphs'.
You're behind the times. These days they'd call their new venture "Alphabet Paragraphs".
What I'm going to do (Score:2)
Good! (Score:2)
Survival is a powerful motivator (Score:2)
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.
The sky is not falling (Score:2)
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 mor
Oh no! What will I do? (Score:2)
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.
What they'll do: (Score:2)
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. A
Clueless? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Why do you even need a mainframe? Just put it on the cloud.
Signed,
Web 2.0 Dev
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.