People who are saying Finance == assembly/COBOL/Java either have never worked in the area or have decided about the elephant by touching a very small part it.

People who are saying Finance == assembly/COBOL/Java either have never worked in the area or have decided about the elephant by touching a very small part it. Within a bank, you can have the accounting department using tested and tried approaches and/or vendor products whereas the machine learning group may be using the latest tech. But finance is not all banks - you can have non-banking financial orgs, rating firms, investment consultancies, private equity, hedge funds and on and on. A hedge fund probably uses super cutting edge stuff in one team while the other has been chugging along with stored procedures and Java. It is too big and varied to generalize.