How many banks really use COBOL? Here in central Europe it seems to be Java, Java, Java for the most part. Since many years actually.

As others have said, US banks seem to run a lot of it, as in they have millions of lines of code of it.

This is not saying that banks don't also have a metric shitload of Java, they do. I think most people would be surprised how much code your average large bank manages.

In the US, there are several thousands of banks and credit unions, and the smaller ones use a patchwork of different vendor software. They likely don't have to write COBOL directly, but some of those components are still running it.

From the vendor's perspective, it doesn't make sense to do a complete rewrite and risk creating hairy financial issues for potentially hundreds of clients.