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I worked on a bank migration project, early on in my career, and these things are a nightmare all around. First, building something like this requires an acute

I worked on a bank migration project, early on in my career, and these things are a nightmare all around. First, building something like this requires an acute understanding of banking software. And banking software means something written in COBOL, RPG400 etc. These languages are pretty old and hence, finding talent for these is like trying to find needle in a haystack. So, most of the stuff has to be done via bruteforce, trial and error. So most of the analysis provided by expert and "senior" business analysts is just that, analysis. Engineers have to bang their heads against the wall to glue stuff together. Secondly, everyone has to be on the same page. The idea has to that customers are priority and egos are not. So stuff like this shouldn't happen at all: > To make matters worse, the Sabadell development team did not have full control – and therefore a full understanding – of the system they were trying to migrate customer data and systems from because Lloyds Banking Group was still the supplier. In our case, the team managing the original product made it difficult for us to merge customer data. They would frequently seed the data incorrectly and refused to provide proper data dictionary. They demanded training on the new product and that all data transformation should be done by them. Needles to see after spending 3 year and 100s of millions, the project was scrapped. The migration was never completed and both banks remained on their respective systems, kicking the can down the road.

arthurfm 9y ago
> banking software means something written in COBOL, RPG400 etc. These languages are pretty old and hence, finding talent for these is like trying to find needle in a haystack. It's really interesting to see which of the new UK and European 'challenger' banks purchased third-party banking software and which decided to spend the time writing their own modern banking systems [1]. A few examples from the linked article... Monzo: For banking ops, it decided to build its own platform. Technology used is mainly open source: Linux, Apache Cassandra distributed database (used by the likes of Apple and Twitter), Google’s Go (golang) programming language at the back-end and PostgreSQL relational database. The system is hosted at two data centres in the UK on Mondo’s own hardware. There is a team of 16 people working on this. Atom Bank: It has created a hefty technology set-up in its run up to the launch: FIS’s Profile core banking system; FIS/Sungard’s Ambit Quantum and Ambit Focus for treasury and risk management; Iress’ Mortgage Sales & Origination (MSO) suite for mortgage business, front-to-back office; Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX for regulatory reporting; Intelligent Environments (IE) for front office capabilities; CSC’s ConfidentID system for security; Phoebus Software for secured business lending and account servicing for residential lending; and WDS Virtual Agent for customer queries supplied by WDS (a subsidiary of Xerox). Starling: The bank has an in-house developed core system. It uses GPS and Bottomline Technologies for processing and payments operations, respectively. At what point does it become cheaper to buy one of these smaller banks and migrate everyone across to their platform? [1] https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/04/uk-challenger-banks-whos-who-and-whats-their-tech/ https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/04/uk-challenger-banks-whos...
- obeattie 9y ago
  I’m Monzo’s Head of Engineering. A lot of the technologies mentioned above for us are accurate but some aren’t in use - notably PostgreSQL - and some others which are crucial are missing - eg. Kubernetes. The vast majority of the platform runs on AWS. Our engineering team has grown to around 60 now. Our entire backend has been built in-house using modern tech. You can read a bit more about it on our blog if you’re interested: https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/ https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac...
  - dankohn1 9y ago
    And you can see Oliver describe his experiences at Monzo next week at KubeCon Copenhagen. https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy-of-a-production-kubernetes-outage-oliver-beattie-head-of-engineering-monzo-bank https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy-of-a-...
  - collyw 9y ago
    Modern doesn't necessarily mean good. AWS hasn't been without its share of problems. "Tried and tested" is something I would be looking for with banking software. Saying that TSB's stuff has just gone titsup and as far as I am aware they aren't using anything too trendy.....
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- collyw 9y ago
  The majority of banking software does work and is well tested. As opposed to new stuff which will likely have some bugs to be ironed out.
- Stranger43 9y ago
  The real answer here is that it's proably never going to be cheaper to buy a bank with a working it platform as merging terabyte worth of actively changing data from an underdocumented 1960 noSQL database into a new greenfield product is the hard problem almost nobody have succeeded at doing without massive problems and unexpected delays and costs. In reality what happens when a bank buys another bank is that yet another middleware layer is introduced so that frontend system can access data from both of the old system not that one system is discarded while the other survive.

arthurfm 9y ago

> banking software means something written in COBOL, RPG400 etc. These languages are pretty old and hence, finding talent for these is like trying to find needle in a haystack. It's really interesting to see which of the new UK and European 'challenger' banks purchased third-party banking software and which decided to spend the time writing their own modern banking systems [1]. A few examples from the linked article... Monzo: For banking ops, it decided to build its own platform. Technology used is mainly open source: Linux, Apache Cassandra distributed database (used by the likes of Apple and Twitter), Google’s Go (golang) programming language at the back-end and PostgreSQL relational database. The system is hosted at two data centres in the UK on Mondo’s own hardware. There is a team of 16 people working on this. Atom Bank: It has created a hefty technology set-up in its run up to the launch: FIS’s Profile core banking system; FIS/Sungard’s Ambit Quantum and Ambit Focus for treasury and risk management; Iress’ Mortgage Sales & Origination (MSO) suite for mortgage business, front-to-back office; Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX for regulatory reporting; Intelligent Environments (IE) for front office capabilities; CSC’s ConfidentID system for security; Phoebus Software for secured business lending and account servicing for residential lending; and WDS Virtual Agent for customer queries supplied by WDS (a subsidiary of Xerox). Starling: The bank has an in-house developed core system. It uses GPS and Bottomline Technologies for processing and payments operations, respectively. At what point does it become cheaper to buy one of these smaller banks and migrate everyone across to their platform? [1] https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/04/uk-challenger-banks-whos-who-and-whats-their-tech/ https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/04/uk-challenger-banks-whos...

obeattie 9y ago
I’m Monzo’s Head of Engineering. A lot of the technologies mentioned above for us are accurate but some aren’t in use - notably PostgreSQL - and some others which are crucial are missing - eg. Kubernetes. The vast majority of the platform runs on AWS. Our engineering team has grown to around 60 now. Our entire backend has been built in-house using modern tech. You can read a bit more about it on our blog if you’re interested: https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/ https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac...
- dankohn1 9y ago
  And you can see Oliver describe his experiences at Monzo next week at KubeCon Copenhagen. https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy-of-a-production-kubernetes-outage-oliver-beattie-head-of-engineering-monzo-bank https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy-of-a-...
- collyw 9y ago
  Modern doesn't necessarily mean good. AWS hasn't been without its share of problems. "Tried and tested" is something I would be looking for with banking software. Saying that TSB's stuff has just gone titsup and as far as I am aware they aren't using anything too trendy.....
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
collyw 9y ago
The majority of banking software does work and is well tested. As opposed to new stuff which will likely have some bugs to be ironed out.
Stranger43 9y ago
The real answer here is that it's proably never going to be cheaper to buy a bank with a working it platform as merging terabyte worth of actively changing data from an underdocumented 1960 noSQL database into a new greenfield product is the hard problem almost nobody have succeeded at doing without massive problems and unexpected delays and costs. In reality what happens when a bank buys another bank is that yet another middleware layer is introduced so that frontend system can access data from both of the old system not that one system is discarded while the other survive.