this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.
In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.
For my bank the website works fast, but app does not. So an old backend is not always the issue.
Believe it or not but I’ve seen the mobile apps be required to use totally different abstraction layers than websites, usually due to different authentication and access management methods.
“Back-end” is often relative when talking about these old systems. There are sometimes multiple layers of abstraction with different business logic built into each layer.
It’s fixable of course, but it is costly to unwind 30-40 years of bad technical decisions made by business people who never understood the systems they were making decisions for.
That sounds like a cop-out to me. Surely they could have snapshots of data in a more reasonable system to make common operations fast (mostly querying data), while keeping the old systems as the source of truth, no? We do that, and we have far fewer customers than a major bank does...
Major bank
There's your answer