[skissane]

> When you are reminded that Citibank lost 0.5 Billions because they spent 0$ on their UI, you may start to understand how much corporates world is rotten to its core and why mainframe is still there.

That wasn’t actually on a mainframe or in COBOL, it was an Oracle app (Oracle Forms/Reports, PL/SQL, Java, etc). And, it was a product from an Oracle subsidiary (OFSS), the software itself was not maintained in-house. Although, to complicate the story, that subsidiary was started by Citibank and then sold to Oracle in the mid-2000s.

So Citibank no longer directly controls the decision on whether the UI is updated, now that is up to Oracle. They can encourage Oracle to do that, and decide how quickly to upgrade if/when Oracle delivers it, but Oracle controls the actual UI. Or they could decide to look for a new product to replace it with.

(Disclaimer: former Oracle employee, was peripherally involved with OFSS banking products during my time at Oracle, although I never had anything to do with Citibank, and I never saw this specific banking product either.)

[dzdt]

The Oracle outsourcing connection is interesting! I read about this incident at the time in Matt Levine's column. [1] See HN discussion at [2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c... [2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180785

[skissane]

It wasn't exactly classic outsourcing.

In the early 1990s, Citibank decided to outsource banking software development to India. Not an unusual decision, but somewhat unusual the approach to it they chose – they set up an Indian subsidiary (iFlex) to develop banking software for them, but also decided the subsidiary would sell the software as a product to other banks. So Citibank owned an Indian subsidiary which developed banking software both for Citibank and also for others. And then Citibank sold that subsidiary to Oracle in the 2000s, and Oracle renamed it from i-Flex to OFSS. Actually Oracle owns the majority of it but a minority of it is publicly listed on the stock exchange in Mumbai.

It isn't just one product, it is a whole suite of banking software applications. I know there are banks who have deployed just certain apps out of the suite and integrated those apps with their legacy core banking. Or, you can buy it all and use it for everything. Given Citibank is the original customer, I imagine they use more of it rather than less of it, but I’m just guessing.