COBOL's Aging Engineers Threaten Global Financial Infrastructure

COBOL, an ancient programming language created in 1960, is still used by financial institutions, major businesses, and governments to power critical infrastructure. Despite its age, COBOL is responsible for a significant portion of daily transactions, including 95% of ATM withdrawals and 80% of card transactions when shopping in-store.

The problem arises from the fact that many COBOL engineers are nearing retirement, and younger generations are not eager to learn this outdated language. This has been an ongoing issue for decades, with Computerworld reporting on staff with COBOL knowledge aging out as early as 2008. In 2013, ZDNet highlighted the issue of universities avoiding teaching COBOL due to its lack of popularity among students.

Moving away from COBOL is a complex and daunting task, as programs containing hundreds of millions of lines of code require significant updates to modern languages. While AI agents have been attempted to rework this code, IBM argues that it's not just about translation, but also about data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance.

In 2018, UK bank TSB suffered a major setback when they transitioned from one platform to another, resulting in millions of users losing access to their accounts. This incident highlights the risks associated with suddenly transitioning an entire financial system over from COBOL to a modern language like Rust.