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by merely-unlikely 678 days ago
> that seems to be driven by the need for someone in the chain the be able to open it in Excel.

This is key. I know from experience that the ability to fall back to emailing CSVs around and having operations folks manually process them in Excel is required way more often than your average tech oriented person would ever expect. Plus a lot of processes that might appear to be automated at banks turn out to have someone doing a ton of manual work as part of their daily process. Things gradually and haphazardly eventually get automated but don’t necessarily start that way. Banking seems to oscillate between strict standards with robust technology and random tasks developed when a specific need arose only to never change for long periods of time.