234. Insights: Legacy to Cloud
Today's show charts out the banking journey from legacy to cloud. Simon Taylor explores how old programming languages have created a new kind of cowboy, untangling legacy systems, and how banks should approach the powers of AI - which isn't quite the magical word everyone hopes it is.
COBOL is a programming language that was ubiquitous to the programming world around 60 years ago. It's since been replaced by newer and more useful languages. Unfortunately, COBOL still underpins a great deal of the banking technology in the world, but no-one's trained in it. This has left to a rise in the number of 60-80 year olds who have come out of retirement to maintain the modern banking world. Cowboys who can do what they want because they're the ones maintaining current banking technology. We take a look at what happened to lead us to this point and interview Ewan Silver, CTO of 11:FS to shed some light on the issue.
Next up we interview Scott Seely, Principal Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He runs us through the complex process of untangling legacy systems to work with new technology and hopefully escape the COBOL cowboys. People are the main sticking point here, so Microsoft have come up with an ingenious solution to enable the financial industry to work with legacy systems while still engaging with the most modern technology and making APIs a much smaller sticking point by extending legacy systems out to them.
We also take a look at the AI problem. It's no secret that the industry has been going wrong with AI for a while now, using it in meetings to get budgets approved or used as a distance promise of results when numbers are flagging. We examine where the industry is making mistakes with AI.
This episode was written by Ollie Judge. Produced by Petrit Berisha & Laura Watkins. Edited by Holly Blaxill and hosted by Simon Taylor.
Legacy to Cloud was brought to you by Microsoft Azure. If you’d like to find out more how they could help you out leverage your existing systems for much more head on over to microsoft.11fs.com
Special Guests: Charlie Wood, Ewan Silver, and Scott Seely.
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