An email has flooded in:

I came across your presentation ‘Perl in the Enterprise’ and happen to have a burning concern closely related to one of the bullets ‘Banks see as a competitive advantage’. I am consulting at a major bank in South Africa, and our team have been using Perl very productively to develop and maintain a customer loyalty rewards application. This application has now suddenly caught the attention of the ‘Architecture Board’ who are questioning whether Perl (or any other scripting language) is appropriate for production use. A presentation will have to be made to this board to present a business case. Whatever the basis for this concern, some quotable and referencable stories from other banks, such as the list included in your clients on the website, would be gold for us. I have searched extensively on the web and cannot find anything in this light which is also recent, as in the last 5 years. Other than Nvidia and Booking.com I can only find anecdotal, 2nd hand evidence of Perl use for medium-to-large applications in well-known corporates. Do you by any chance have anything or any contacts in those banks that would be willing to respond to an email to confirm their use of Perl and perhaps repeat the competitive advantage claim?

The presentation he’s talking about is Perl in the Enterprise, which I gave at Linux World Expo in 2005. The particular line he’s interested in is on slide 6 where I say that banks see using Perl as a competitive advantage. I’m pretty sure that I was paraphrasing Phillip Moore of Morgan Stanley who had said something similar in a keynote at OSCON in about 2001.

Obviously I know that banks in the City of London still use Perl. But it’s been several years since I worked at one, so my personal experience is slightly out of date. What my correspondent needs is people who are currently working in banks who are happy to go public and say “we use Perl in our production systems”. It would be even more helpful if they could add “and here’s why…”.

Can anyone out there help?