Comment Little development? Hardly... (Score 3, Insightful) 318
It isn't just the financial sector, its the medical sector, major distributors, casinos, and more, who use mainframes and similar (I work on an iSeries which at our scale is very much a mainframe - especially in reliability). COBOL and also RPGLE (looks like C/Pascal now) form the back end of many systems because of their ease of programming and especially because they are good at business math. Front end we have web facing apps; javascript/php/etc; RESTful services, and more. New development occurs everyday and is far more modern in its application that your aware. It isn't a land of green screens and such, but those do have their place.
The technology is anything but outdated, if anything we are as modern if not more. The key difference is dead nuts reliability, both in code and hardware. Downtime usually is when the site fails.