Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I don't think a lot of orgs which use data as core-infra could modernize

I argue this is a happy conclusion, not a problem to be solved.

What would "modern" bring to a bank except even more pain & suffering? Database technology invented in the 80-90s is more than sufficient for tracking information at the scale that 99% of financial institutions operate at today.

Virtually every core conversion project I've ever heard of has been a failure or is currently a burning wreck on its way to the bottom.

The only new bank projects that touch data and seem to succeed are LOB apps with highly curated experiences that are tightly integrated with the actual front/back office business. Having buy-in from staff regarding your UX is way more important than spinning out a 20 page AWS architecture diagram. The CTO can only take you so far through the vendor approval process at a bank. Retail operations (i.e. the people who are responsible for the brick & mortar branches) typically have substantially more pull in these organizations.

> What would "modern" bring to a bank except even more pain & suffering?

In the most simple term, a future.

Except if your bank is literally too big to fail, at some point you have to either move on from 80s technology or at least bring in an adaptation layer, because your profit center have also moved on or you're facing harder competition.

A typical example is banks getting merged: there will be a fight to see which system stays and which one disappears. If you froze your technology 4 decades ago it won't be your stack winning. [0]

Another is the evolution legal frameworks: EU countries passed laws requiring interoperable APIs to perform standard banking operations. Being a customer of a decent bank or a fossilized one made a huge difference and the market grew a lot more competitive. People would start hedging their bets when legacy banks looked too far behind.

[0] The most interesting and recent example of this is Mizuho bank just miserably failing at that task to the point the gov. intervened and anyone not married to them probably moved out.

https://www.mizuhogroup.com/news/2021/06/20210615_2release_e...

> A typical example is banks getting merged: there will be a fight to see which system stays and which one disappears. If you froze your technology 4 decades ago it won't be your stack winning. [0]

In my experience (small/mid-size US banks), the institution with more assets or branches usually wins. It rarely has anything to do with technology. If a 6 region, 200 branch monster comes in and wants to buy some 4 branch relic in the West Texas desert, it doesn't matter if the smaller institution has achieved AGI and an intergalactic core platform. They're almost inevitably gonna be merging their records into some old boring IBM system.

The landscape is a little different over in Australia. Most of the Big Four are closing as many branches as they can. Branches are no longer a mover or shaker, because most Australians never touch cash anymore. [0] Most transactions are digital.

Almost as many people pay with card as with phone.

Faster record systems, faster transfers, actually do win people over here.

[0] https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/cash-u...

I welcome the day when the US stops devoting enormous amounts of useful real estate to bank branches. They are a sad simulacrum of actual street life, taking up tons of space to advertise a bank and contributing to high rents that preclude less-profitable small businesses. One step up from billboards.

I think it depends on why they're merging. If the goal is just to increase size, as you point out doing it at the lowest cost will be the only POV.

If they're doing it for more strategic purposes, the calculation becomes more complex and there will be more "reverse" acquisitions where the entity closer to the target is prioritized.

> If you froze your technology 4 decades ago it won't be your stack winning.

I’m unclear whether this is bad for the business or just bad for folks hoping to keep their jobs.

I tossed out my credit card because the UX was bad. At this point most of the CC services are utilities or commodities. Just get another at a bank with better apps and website.

Yup, I'm moving to a new ptimary checking account currently because I'm sick of my local credit union that is apparently so incompetent they can't handle sending email alerts correctly. Also, any bank or credit card that won't support Plaid seems not even worth considering at this point.

Had to look up what plaid was. Think I’d prefer Fednow support and/or Aus/NZ style modern banking, that’s future proof. I see no reason for a third-party to be involved.

It sucks, but it's the only service anyone ever uses. Doesn't really matter what I prefer when every financial service i want to use offers Plaid or nothing.

Another system migration example (TSB, 2018) from the UK: https://www.tsb.co.uk/news-releases/slaughter-and-may.html

Mizuho is doing great, they're probably the least awful of the big Japanese banks. Everywhere is like this, and "old" technology doesn't seem to make the places that use it appreciably worse.

Mizuho Finance as a group is doing fine, partly because their main business is not consumers and companies can't just leave their main bank on a whim.

And also partly because it's the third biggest bank of Japan and it wouldn't be allowed to not be doing fine ("too big to fail" doesn't even start to describe the impact of a group this size starting to go down)

Do they do "great" ? Arguably no. They shut down a number of consumer facing locations, had a hard time recruiting, and compared to Mitsubishi and Mitsui the gap has kept widening. In their small/middle customer businesses they're starting to face the rise of GMO and Rakuten where the two other are too far ahead to even need to care about it.

> Do they do "great" ? Arguably no. They shut down a number of consumer facing locations, had a hard time recruiting, and compared to Mitsubishi and Mitsui the gap has kept widening. In their small/middle customer businesses they're starting to face the rise of GMO and Rakuten where the two other are too far ahead to even need to care about it.

The last year I can find figures for has Mitsubishi's assets -5.46%, SM -4.14%, and Mizuho -2.03% (so yes a decline in absolute terms, but that's the best performance in the top 10, and sounds like closing the gap with Mitsubishi and SM rather than widening it). I can't find a branch count but Mizuho has vastly more ATMs (around 4x as many as Mitsubishi) and that number is increasing. They've continued to make consumer-facing improvements recently like their wallet app allowing electronic money payment directly from you bank account, and English support in their main app. Of course like all of the big banks they're facing competition from the rise of the net banks, but as far as I can see they're doing as well as any of the big four, perhaps better.

Yes, please, fix the UX. That was my biggest gripe, working as an FSR at the bank.

One particular thing was we had to convert transit #s into branch numbers regularly. We did this by looking at a sheet of paper of course. Eventually I got fed up and wrote a web app so you could just punch in the numbers and have it instantly convert. I checked and people are still using it 10 years after I quit, which means nothing has changed and they're still using the same god awful software.

They did move some data at some point. I know this because they screwed that up too and partially merged my mom's and my bank accounts, which is a pretty bad error. Would be worse if it was some rando. Speaking of... That's exactly what AT&T did.

>What would "modern" bring to a bank except even more pain & suffering?

It probably depends on what "modern" means here. If updating from tons of COBOL to {Julia, Python, Rust, or some other well known language} with an update to an SQLite backend (or perhaps postgres is acceptable for very specific scenarios), that is likely a good choice due to being able to fix old cruft and add maintainability for the future. If it's a switch to some nosql database backend with everything switched to some cypher-based lang or anything that touches javascript in any way, it's probably a mistake.

Why SQLite? Why Julia? These seem like poor options for banks.

In the case of SQLite, I'd say incredibly poor (to the extent that the person who made the decision should be fired).

I would like a bank which supports U2F.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com