Former finance developer: 1. Without Excel, every finance company will need another 100 developers, BA's, managers and QA to do programming and updates. $$$$.

Former finance developer: 1. Without Excel, every finance company will need another 100 developers, BA's, managers and QA to do programming and updates. $$$$. 2. Most of the data sources I've seen are heterogenous or very expensive. It comes in from big companies via secure FTP overnight, small companies via pdf. Big companies won't change their rules for you, small ones don't have the staff to do it. You can quietly and immediately export to excel from a terminal at 5pm, or be charged an extra 200K a year for the overnight deluxe data export package and still not get the same bond valuation you need to reconcile. (looking at you, Bloomberg!). 3. Every rockstar portfolio manager has their own models, and not even the VP of IT dares tell them what to use. There's no "bog-standard model" that everyone uses. That's the expensive PM's edge. 4. Speed. Requirements, test cases, test server, scheduling personnel, project planning, testing, promotion to prod, signoff, takes a month for trivial stuff if you're lucky. Trading opportunity long gone. Analysts grab a spreadsheet, do it in half a day, make or reject the trade. 5. Capability. Pivot tables. Compact, resizeable, color-coded, read/writeable grid, notations on the side, instant recalc, reorientable text. Row inserts. Printing. Ugh. 6. Risk. Analyst does the spreadsheet, IT hands are clean. "Not our fault if you screw up". 7. Resumes. What developer wants to spend 10 years coding models and reports that are regularly modified or discarded with each new analyst and PM's whim? 8. Time. FO spends 16 hours a day trading or researching under immense stress. Asking them to find, let alone spend, 2 hours a day explaining workflows to devs is... unrealistic. 9. Education. Devs know development, not financial instruments and regs. SME's who understand both software design and finance are rare and expensive therefore used on major projects. This may hurt egos here but most devs are some combination of untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend to start explaining a solution instead of first listening to the problem. Devs do major dev stuff where it's warranted. Analysts can keep Excel where it's not.