Fintech Insider By 11:fs

COBOL is a programming language that was ubiquitous to the programming world around 60 years ago. It's since been replaced by newer and more useful languages. Unfortunately, COBOL still underpins a great deal of the banking technology in the world, but no-one's trained in it. This has left to a rise in the number of 60-80 year olds who have come out of retirement to maintain the modern banking world. Cowboys who can do what they want because they're the ones maintaining current banking technology. We take a look at what happened to lead us to this point and interview Ewan Silver, CTO of 11:FS to shed some light on the issue. Next up we interview Scott Seely, Principal Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He runs us through the complex process of untangling legacy systems to work with new technology and hopefully escape the COBOL cowboys. People are the main sticking point here, so Microsoft have come up with an ingenious solution to enable the financial industry to work with legacy systems while still engaging