Technology
Scarcity of COBOL Engineers Threatens Financial Infrastructure
COBOL, a language that dates back 66 years, still powers critical financial infrastructure and 95% of ATM transactions, IBM reports. As the engineers who maintain these systems retire and fewer new developers learn the language, the skills needed to keep the infrastructure running could become scarce. This shortage could also affect data centers that support financial services, where legacy systems still run on COBOL. Banks and businesses may struggle to maintain systems that cannot be easily replaced. The problem has existed for years and is expected to worsen as experienced COBOL programmers retire.
Although COBOL was never intended to become a deeply embedded part of modern infrastructure, it remains widely used by financial institutions, businesses, and governments. The language has evolved, adding object‑oriented programming in 2002 and a new standard in 2023, but modernising the language does not solve the shortage of people who can maintain decades‑old systems. The issue was highlighted by Computerworld in 2008 and 2012, and ZDNet in 2013 noted that universities were avoiding teaching COBOL because it had become "uncool."
Replacing COBOL systems is not simple. Financial systems can contain hundreds of millions of lines of code, and simply asking AI to translate that code into a newer language may not be sufficient. Calvin Smith, in a breakdown by the YouTube channel OpenHands, said attempts to use AI agents for such work have not been particularly successful. IBM has also argued that modernising COBOL systems involves more than code translation; it requires data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware‑accelerated performance. That complexity makes any transition, gradual or not, risky. In 2018, a major failure occurred when UK bank TSB shifted from one platform to another, leading to a £48.65 million ($65.86 million) fine and affecting millions of customers.
The shrinking pool of COBOL engineers is creating financial incentives for those with the expertise. Some jobs require several years of experience with the language and can pay between $100,000 and $150,000, with some positions offering more. The bigger question is what happens when even those engineers begin to disappear. Replacing decades of carefully maintained financial infrastructure with newer languages such as Rust would be expensive and carry significant risks. For banks and other organisations, the challenge may therefore be less about whether COBOL is old and more about whether enough people will remain who understand the systems built around it.