> no one except for banks can afford one Banks smaller than the big ~5 in the US cannot afford anything when it comes to IT infrastructure. I am not aware of

> no one except for banks can afford one Banks smaller than the big ~5 in the US cannot afford anything when it comes to IT infrastructure. I am not aware of a single state/regional bank that wants to have their IBM on premise anymore - at any cost. Most of these customers go through multiple layers of 3rd party indirection and pay one of ~3 gigantic banking service vendors for access to hosted core services on top of IBM. Despite the wildly ramping complexity of working with 3rd parties, banks still universally prefer this over the idea of rewriting the core software for commodity systems.