It might not be as easy as you think if the system has somehow survived without an upgrade for decades. Who knows, maybe it's that ancient?
Back in the day I worked on CODASYL style databases (IDMS) that was EBCDIC. This is before relational databases were a thing. We had no PCs: all of the companies’ data was is in the Mainframe in EBCDIC. No ASCII anywhere, let alone UTF-8.
I remember back in the day when Ingress was the cool kid (running on HP-UX at our shop I think). Almost overnight there was a fork in the road and everyone went to either Orcale or SQL Server. Now I would touch anything other then Postgres. The more I use and learn about it the more I appreciate all the work that has gone into it over the years.
It's permissionless, as in no reporting transactions over $10k to the government, no ID checks to create an account, no names and addresses in the "global transaction log" etc.
To me, privacy is an essential component of freedom, and the government and banking system knowing everything about my transactions is not as bad as everyone knowing something about my transactions.
As a counterpoint to this I hate it when data is treated like code. Need to create a new cost center? Raise a change request. Get an IP addressed added to a list in a firewall? CR. Bureaucracies thrive on this stuff.
Even worse when master data is hardcoded into applications. It still happens especially when a vendor can make an ongoing revenue stream from it.
That’s very biased. Importantly the fed wallet is interest free, banks should compete with it in the same way they compete with cash under the mattress — by providing interest.
Back in the day I worked on CODASYL style databases (IDMS) that was EBCDIC. This is before relational databases were a thing. We had no PCs: all of the companies’ data was is in the Mainframe in EBCDIC. No ASCII anywhere, let alone UTF-8.