[nexawave-ai]

One of the reasons that Cobol is still so popular is because of banking products like Tata Consultancy's BANCS. If you're starting up a new Bank and need an off the shelf, secure and robust banking system, then TCS BANCS is a viable option. It comes with TCS support and dedicated developers, to implement new features or customize existing ones at a premium.

Cobol is powerful when it comes to batch jobs, and you can bundle transactions ( ie. TX1900 means execute this transactions, which consists of 10 other transactions that will create a new client, and open a savings account, etc). Your front end can be whatever you want and all your business logic is embedded into Cobol transactions.

The con however, is that these consultancy companies do not share these transactions with their clients or external developers. You'll either have to figure it out on your own ( good luck ), or use the consultancy company. These products are really cash cows for their vendors.

[mousetree]

There are _many_ other off the shelf core banking systems - some are more modern and cloud first (Mambu) and others more direct competitors to BANCS (Flexcube, Finacle, Temenos). I don't think many of them are Cobol/mainframe based.