Is COBOL still used by banks? The people I know who work in two different major UK banks suggest everything is Java now, with Oracle as the preferred database solution.
Nothing beats a mainframe for throughput & reliability and lots of the code is still COBOL.
IIRC SocGen has a vast amount of code written in some awful monstrosity of an internal language that nobody else has used for decades, but the cost of changing everything over to something more modern is so prohibitive that they just keep on accreting over the existing codebase.
Short answer: Yes :-)
Still the backbone of many banks, building societies, credit card companies, etc. See http://www.careerjet.co.uk/cobol-jobs.html for some of job adverts. This old 2009 article http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/09/cobol-inter... is still pretty much true AFAIK.
Within hour drive from my house, I can tally at least a half-dozen corporate IT shops that outsourced heavily in this way, axing thousands (in aggregate) of jobs that normally were served by internal/domestic consulting houses.
Yes, on the backend there is still a lot of COBOL, even if it is running on micro-hardware as opposed to the old big iron. Claims adjudication, utility metering, charge card processing, billing for just about any corporation that existed pre-1980, etc.…