>>At the heart of most of the big banks is an IBM mainframe
I am reminded of your good post from 2011 here....www.car4play.com/forum/post/index.htm?t=8483&m=187294&v=e
It is possible to change from Mainframes to server based systems. In the early '00s WANG told us that they would stop support of the computer (mini probably) our division used.
We had to find an alternative quickly.
The project team decided to buy in expertise from the USA to re-write the code line by line with no new functionality. They updated the system overnight in the States and we tested it in the day.
There must have been 10 person years coding and 10 person years testing. There was some key capture testing as well, key presses from the old system were fed in to the new system and the results were always the same (save for differences in the way decimal place rounding occurs on currencies).
The new system worked well for 17 years when it was changed to an "off the shelf" package written by a specialist industry software provider who wraps it in the banks' logos and will even host it if the bank wants. We use their product and it is good. The downside is that there is no differentiation between banks services, log on to ours and save for our branding, it looks and works exactly the same as another bank that uses the same software and it's extremely difficult to get any customisation done.
There used to be 3 such companies for our small sector but sadly since 2004 there are now there are only 2.
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