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Comment by os7borne | Hacker News Reader

3 years ago I learned that large insurance companies in India still use COBOL. That fact blew my mind. This fact (Estimates as high as 80% of financial transactions use... COBOL) further blows my mind as I thought only Indian financial institutions are rigid. Clearly not.

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A Danish news article on the death of mainframes (or their unwillingness to die) where they have some stats that says that 10 out 10 of the largest insurance companies still use mainframes for they core systems. So learning that large insurance companies run Cobol isn't that surprising.

They cite: https://www.share.org/blog/mainframe-matters-how-mainframes-...

Looking at job listings over a few months this is easy to verify for the nordic countries.

that's quite interesting! esp considering these ones went digital not so long ago. and makes me super curious why they went with Cobol? is it coz PSU -> lowest price bidding -> Cobol ? just blind guessing here.

Maybe they had a digital "core" backend for reporting and such, even though front offices etc were on paper.

okay. that is possible. in that case, it would've needed massive amounts of data entry work to feed all paperwork stuff into the core backend.

Yes, that's just how things worked way back when. Say the computer systems banks and corporations used in the 1960s, for instance.

And that massive data entry work was still less work than running the calculations and summaries and projections etc on paper alone.

So do insurance companies in the nordic countries in Europe.

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