The scarcity of Cobol software programmers in Hong Kong is threatening the competitiveness of local banks.
Industry officials said without an adequate supply of Cobol programmers, a significant number of small and medium-size banks were expected to be hamstrung in raising service levels - through strategies such as customer relationship management (CRM) in a market bound for further de-regulation.
This situation would accelerate consolidation among banks - facing stiff competition from major local players as well as from overseas, said Dao Heng Bank chief information officer David Tsui.
Local banks are bracing for increased rivalry as interest-rate deregulation picks up pace on July 1. In the middle of this development, banks are also expected to raise demand for Cobol software programming experts to help them move their legacy applications to more advanced computing environments.
Cobol, which stands for Common Business Oriented Language, has been the most widely used high-level programming language for business applications during the past 35 years. There are supposed to be more lines of programming code written in Cobol than in any other programming language.
Banks and many other traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses have continued to use Cobol for their payroll, accounting, and other business application programs on their mainframe computers. Programmers with Cobol skills were much sought after by major corporations and contractors worldwide up to the start of last year, when they helped correct the error in the dates on many Cobol-written programs identified as susceptible to the Y2K bug.