NEW YORK–An “alarmingly large” portion of the world’s financial systems, including 95% of all ATM activity in the United States and 80% of all in-person credit card transactions, run on 60-year-old computer code that “no one knows anymore,” according to a new report.
The code is COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), which will be known to veteran IT personnel in credit unions, but today “only a small community of programmers know it,” according to PC Magazine.
The report notes that some $3 trillion worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language today, and even though most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the “top mainframe programming languages used today.”
PC Magazine cited data from the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT) that found 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL.
“The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days,” PC Magazine said. “Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody's learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are an increasingly hard to find. Many of these ‘COBOL cowboys’ are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.”
What Can Be Done?
So, what can be done?
According to PC Magazine, some are looking to artificial intelligence to help address the problem. IBM, for example, has built a generative AI-powered code assistant called “watsonx” that is helping to convert “all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java.”
But PC Magazine also noted it’s not that simple, with Skyla Loomis, VP of IBM Z Software telling the publication, “It might be 80 or 90% of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It’s a productivity enhancement—not a developer replacement."
Skepticism Shared
One analyst with Gartner also told PC Magazine he is skeptical of the IBM effort because at this time there are no case studies to validate its efforts.
“So, while AI code translation is certainly a promising idea, it still remains to be seen if it can actually be deployed successfully and make an impact in the real world,” PC Magazine reported. “If this all pans out though, it could have implications far beyond the COBOL conundrum. Updating and modernizing old code is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's possible with AI-augmented code creation, and IBM isn't the only company racing to build a solution.”
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