Do Financial Technology startups of today require mainframe?

[Kapil Sharma]

Hi,

Do the Financial Tech startups require mainframe at the backend?

Banks use mainframe at the back-end for payment and transaction processing. Do today's Financial Technology with huge transactions startups also require such robust platform? In case they require it, what are they using in place of mainframes? How do they survive with so much of data with out mainframe and we mostly know that they don't use mainframes....

[nicc]

Do today's Financial Technology with huge transactions startups

This does not make grammatical sense. Do you mean:

Do today's Financial Technology startups with huge transactions

?
Define "huge" - millions of transactions or millions of money units - or both?

As a startup the company will have a small customer base and low value transactions. They could probably do their accounts by hand but more likely use one of the approved PC-based accounting packages. As the company evolves so will its financial processing and this may be moved to a larger system either owned or leased or time-shared in a data-centre. And so on.

[Robert Sample]

I think it is not good to generalize about mainframes like you're doing. Startups don't need mainframes -- they may need access to mainframes, but there are companies that provide processing services which suffice for the startup. Once they get to a certain size, they may decide to acquire a mainframe of their own to cut their costs, but by then they are no longer a startup.

[Kapil Sharma]

By huge I meant more than a million like many books and article on the relevance of mainframes says about the capability of mainframes. My question was intended on knowing how good the mainframes is for a small start-up which can think to grow big in coming years. Should they be thinking to invest in mainframes?

[Kapil Sharma]

I think it is not good to generalize about mainframes like you're doing. Startups don't need mainframes -- they may need access to mainframes, but there are companies that provide processing services which suffice for the startup. Once they get to a certain size, they may decide to acquire a mainframe of their own to cut their costs, but by then they are no longer a startup.

Thanks.

Facebook, twitter like companies started as mainframes and became so big but never heard them using mainframes. So was thinking what can be usage of mainframes in future if big companies also not requiring them.

[Robert Sample]

So was thinking what can be usage of mainframes in future if big companies also not requiring them.

This generalization is so WRONG it is ludicrous. Are you aware that something like 14 of the world's 15 largest insurance companies use mainframes? That 70% of the Fortune 500 companies use mainframes? That if you use an ATM anywhere in the world, there is a 95% chance that your data will go through a mainframe at some point? Big companies that use mainframes were surveyed this year, and their responses indicate mainframes will continue to be VITAL to their operations for at least another 10 years, and most likely beyond that into the foreseeable future. There are big companies that do not use mainframes, but they are generally in the minorities in their industries.