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How do you message to your existing customers that you're holding their life savings on fragile 1970s tech? Also, you'll still have to write wrappers for the o

How do you message to your existing customers that you're holding their life savings on fragile 1970s tech? Also, you'll still have to write wrappers for the old tech (iPhone apps which access the COBOL core) in order to maintain feature parity with the other banks.

coldtea 10y ago
>How do you message to your existing customers that you're holding their life savings on fragile 1970s tech? You mean "battle tested for 40+ years, totally solid 1970s tech"? If anything, it's any crap they'd write now that would be MORE fragile.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kristianc 10y ago
  You're thinking like an engineer. You're right, of course, but the public is trained to trust the latest and greatest. If 'battle tested' was the most salient selling point we'd be on Series 60 or QNX phones. 'We're putting new customers on the latest technology and keeping existing ones on our old systems' is not going to be an easy thing to message to the general public.
  - GFischer 10y ago
    If 'battle tested' was the most salient selling point we'd be on Series 60 or QNX phones. Actually, there are more Series 40 and Symbian phones sold today than iPhones - 350 million to 200 million (India / rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America are the main buyers). Many people here still miss the old Nokias. Of course, Android is the new Series 60. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-sold-35-million-feature-phones-in-2016-strategy-analytics-1663745 http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-sold-35-million-f... http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/india-smartphone-shipments-to-overtake-feature-phones-in-2016-cmr-295949.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/india-smartphone-shi...
Bluestrike2 10y ago
The code is from the 1970s, but a lot of the hardware has been replaced over the years. IBM has been pretty aggressive about maintaining compatibility options because they're fully aware of just how much legacy code their customers need to use. And when it hasn't been, maintenance has usually been pretty well-handled. Those machines were usually built to last. There's even a company that was still using an IBM 402 accounting machine as of 2012.[0] And there's plenty of military hardware using 70s/80s computer tech. But I don't see this ever really coming to consumer attention. They're never directly--or visibly--interacting with old mainframes. From their perspective, they're using the newest tech. The mainframe in the background doesn't exist to them. If they even think about it, it's just magic. The closest you might have gotten to the public talking about legacy systems was probably the healthcare.gov debacle, when a number of news articles mentioned integration issues as being an problem. Those were big issues in themselves, but they weren't the main problem behind the site's development nor were they ever a major discussion point. 0. http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b...
- kristianc 10y ago
  Here in the U.K. at least, banks using legacy systems is usually mentioned when a bank has an outage / ATMs failing. The canonical example when it comes to UK banking is the RBS outage, which meant that customers could not make payments for three weeks. RBS was hit with a £56m fine for that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/11242479/RBS-hit-with-56m-fine-for-IT-breakdown.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/112...
  - insomniacity 10y ago
    And this right here is the reason that banks can't just sit on their ticking timebombs. Another commenter says there's no incentive for managers or execs to stick their necks out, but £56m is quite an incentive.
    - Bluestrike2 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

>How do you message to your existing customers that you're holding their life savings on fragile 1970s tech? You mean "battle tested for 40+ years, totally solid 1970s tech"? If anything, it's any crap they'd write now that would be MORE fragile.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kristianc 10y ago
You're thinking like an engineer. You're right, of course, but the public is trained to trust the latest and greatest. If 'battle tested' was the most salient selling point we'd be on Series 60 or QNX phones. 'We're putting new customers on the latest technology and keeping existing ones on our old systems' is not going to be an easy thing to message to the general public.
- GFischer 10y ago
  If 'battle tested' was the most salient selling point we'd be on Series 60 or QNX phones. Actually, there are more Series 40 and Symbian phones sold today than iPhones - 350 million to 200 million (India / rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America are the main buyers). Many people here still miss the old Nokias. Of course, Android is the new Series 60. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-sold-35-million-feature-phones-in-2016-strategy-analytics-1663745 http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-sold-35-million-f... http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/india-smartphone-shipments-to-overtake-feature-phones-in-2016-cmr-295949.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/india-smartphone-shi...

Bluestrike2 10y ago

The code is from the 1970s, but a lot of the hardware has been replaced over the years. IBM has been pretty aggressive about maintaining compatibility options because they're fully aware of just how much legacy code their customers need to use. And when it hasn't been, maintenance has usually been pretty well-handled. Those machines were usually built to last. There's even a company that was still using an IBM 402 accounting machine as of 2012.[0] And there's plenty of military hardware using 70s/80s computer tech. But I don't see this ever really coming to consumer attention. They're never directly--or visibly--interacting with old mainframes. From their perspective, they're using the newest tech. The mainframe in the background doesn't exist to them. If they even think about it, it's just magic. The closest you might have gotten to the public talking about legacy systems was probably the healthcare.gov debacle, when a number of news articles mentioned integration issues as being an problem. Those were big issues in themselves, but they weren't the main problem behind the site's development nor were they ever a major discussion point. 0. http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b...

kristianc 10y ago
Here in the U.K. at least, banks using legacy systems is usually mentioned when a bank has an outage / ATMs failing. The canonical example when it comes to UK banking is the RBS outage, which meant that customers could not make payments for three weeks. RBS was hit with a £56m fine for that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/11242479/RBS-hit-with-56m-fine-for-IT-breakdown.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/112...
- insomniacity 10y ago
  And this right here is the reason that banks can't just sit on their ticking timebombs. Another commenter says there's no incentive for managers or execs to stick their necks out, but £56m is quite an incentive.
  - Bluestrike2 10y ago