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Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

"If you have some money left over at the end of the month, imagine being able to move it into a P2P lending platform with one click. Or being able to choose a mortgage from any one of a number of providers based on your previous spending habits and income."

Keep imagining. I've been working on UK mortgage software for the last few months, and it's stone age. I'm talking interfacing with a Fujitsu VME mainframe stoneage.

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One of the more interesting aspects of Mondo is from their blog they appear to be building their software stack from the ground up, as opposed to taking the approach of other new banks and buying in/white-labelling core systems from established providers.

So it'll be interesting to see if a set of new FS companies grow up who aren't dependent on legacy systems. If they do you could see a world where they can more easily interoperate without a descent into mainframe batch land :)

Why do you think that's happening? Didn't anyone bother to build something decent or is the market hostile towards change?

A lot of banks & building societies built mainframe systems to run mortgage businesses in 70s. They're still running on them, and don't want to bear the cost of transition. When the housing market is buoyant they transact and make money, so a system overhaul isn't a priority. And when times are bad, there's no money for that kind of project. As for the software vendors serving this sector, that's another story...

This has been my experience after 7 years on the IT side of the financial services industry. I worked at one of the top 10 commercial banks in the US and within the last 3 years they abandoned a multi-year migration project to a real time infrastructure. Many huge banks still run Tandem systems.

Traditional banks are very risk averse and have large investments in older tech.

It's a brave company who chooses the ground-up re-write of a core system in the banking world.

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