internet applications and banks

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internet applications and banks

Hi All,

This days internet applications widely are replacing desktop applications. I do not like to discus the reasons here.

But I do not think that the banks will replace their desktop software (of course they have web application for the masses, but their core software is desktop).

I assume they they use desktop because of speed, well tested components, reporting, warehousing ...

What do you why are think they still preferring desktop for their core system?

Regards

Because it costs a huge amount of money to migrate all these ancient systems that they have. Everything that they use is interconnected and has been built up over a period of many, many years. When your apps are this business-critical, you just don't screw with them.

hollsk 2010-07-17 08:43:04

But do you think that if a new bank building the software from scratch will decide for desktop of for web ?

darko petreski 2010-07-17 08:50:22

@darko that will depend on a lot of factors like what kind of hardware the employees use.

Pekka 2010-07-17 09:35:05

Than is not the main reason what technology to use.

darko petreski 2010-07-17 09:43:25

that will depend on the people that are building the app. some people still use desktop app, because they are too lazy to learn web development.

01 2010-07-17 09:47:07

@01: “too lazy to learn web development” is a pretty bad argument tbh.@hollsk: Yes, migrating systems always is expensive. However, it seems wrong to assume that any bank that has been around for a few decades still uses ancient UNIX terminals as their fat client application. I am sure that quite a lot of those run on Java or other modern platforms. Thus the migration is probably not as big as you might think. (After all, they’re probably not throwing 80yrs old COBOL developers into a AJAX web dev team! ^^)

hangy 2010-07-17 10:14:45

@hangy - A lot of folks would maybe be surprised about how much cobol banks still use! It's the language that will never die, it seems. In any case "ancient" in computing terms isn't even necessarily that old. In order for banks to decide to move away from desktop software and do everything with that funky web thang then they'd need to be persuaded that there are clear benefits to doing so. The main 'benefits' that I can think of are things like access-anywhere and API-building; probably not the kind of things that the lack of in internal apps would keep bankers awake at night.

hollsk 2010-07-17 11:51:47

Banks usually totally control their IT environment and have a very homogeneous set of client machines. It stands to reason many advantages of web apps (especially platform independence) are not killer features for a bank.

Plus, as @hollsk says, migrating that stuff is expensive and systems often run for decades. The bank I have my checking account with still used to run OS/2 as the client OS a few years back. I'm not sure they have switched yet.

Pekka 2010-07-17 08:47:35

As I mentioned in another comment, not all banks use ancient client systems. There are probably quite a few that run “normal” desktop clients. Some examples with a not-too-small userbase are OSPlus (Finanz Informatik), agree (Fiducia) or bank21 (GAD).

hangy 2010-07-17 10:32:03

+1 A:

why change something that works?
why change something pretty stable for boiling specifications?
Why change something safe to something full of security issues?

Switching to a client-server model had obvious benefits (and the adoption was very fast).

But switching to a Web browser Interface means that you have to delegate THE critical component (communications, displaying, security) to a notoriously unsafe, unstable and never defined third-party tool.

That's like if you asked why banks don't pay total strangers to keep the bank keys during the night.

Loric 2010-07-17 08:52:42

Why would you say that the web browser is “never defined”? The banks’ IT could still restrict the clients to a specific browser. Once you do that, you could also measure and define the quality and security of that product. (ie. use a known good version of Firefox and not let the users browse any unknown websites…)

hangy 2010-07-17 10:10:42

As a matter of fact, I know that the GAD (German Wikipedia) has been working on a web based version of their core product “bank21” since over a year. The current version of bank21 is a Java client and the idea of the migration project – which they named “wave” – is to have their client banks use web based thin clients.

Since the architecture is probably decoupled pretty well, the web based client will probably still be coded in Java and may use a lot of code from the current product. Also, I do not think that they will switch away from using COBOL, JCL etc. based applications on their mainframes any time soon. ;)

hangy 2010-07-17 09:37:20

It's a bit od a special case since GAD is an IT service provider for hundreds of smaller banks, so there's less central control over the deployment environment, which makes web apps more attractive.

Michael Borgwardt 2010-07-17 10:24:54

Yep, but the question was asked in a relatively general way. In a lot of answers, people seem to rule out web apps for internal use in banks and that just seems wrong. :) Also, companies like Finanz Informatik, Fiducia and GAD are pretty similar in that way and do have quite some users, which makes it a bit less of a special case, IMHO.

hangy 2010-07-17 10:40:28

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