Zombie Technologies in Financial Services

With Zombie Fever in full swing, I was thinking about technologies in banks and credit unions we just can’t seem to kill. Five came to mind this afternoon:

• COBOL: Plenty of software used in financial services is still written in COBOL (and running on mainframes for that matter). The cool kids don’t want to learn COBOL these days, so it’s getting tougher to find talent to support these legacy applications.

• **Internet Explorer 6 **: Until recently, it seemed like there was always one vendor that’s holding financial services CIOs back from upgrading desktops to a later version of IE (and from Windows XP to Windows 7, for that matter)? Even my financial services blog with 8 readers still gets hits from IE6. What’s it going to take to kill this abomination?

• Voice Response Unit: Even in the age of Internet and mobile banking, it’s a rare financial institution that’s currently thinking about the day they can shut down the voice response unit. Nobody’s VRU call volumes are increasing, but volume isn’t dropping quickly enough in many places to make a case for retirement.

• DOS: You don’t see DOS a whole lot these days, but when you do it’s typically on the teller line where DOS-based teller applications are still alive and well (depending on your definition of “well”). With teller volume dropping, the upgrade to a web front-end isn’t easy for some to make a business case for, so DOS survives another year ¹…

• PBX: Here’s another telephony technology that’s tough to kill. Mass-conversion to voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony for the sake of standardization is tough to justify when the PBX is still depreciating, working fine, and interoperating with other VoIP systems at the Bank. Once these things roll off of the books, all bets are off.

And don’t get me started on zombie payment technologies…

For fun, I checked to see if anyone else was posting about zombie technologies, and sure enough IT World had a piece last week. I definitely would have put fax machines on my list if I’d thought of it first. So what zombie technologies are surviving in your shop?