I’ve been a Java developer for almost two decades, and one thing has stood out to me: nearly all fintech enterprise companies rely on Java. This trend has been consistent throughout my career, but I never gave it much thought until recently. On top of that, almost every job offer I get on LinkedIn involves Java or C, particularly in fintech.
IMO, the JVM is probably the best software platform on the planet. The engineering in there is incredible. It’s not just banks and fintech, technology companies recognize this too. AWS is primarily a Java system. Google uses huge amounts of Java in its products.
But why is Java so dominant in the financial sector? Below are the two given reasons:
- The Maturity and Stability of Java
Java stands out as one of the most stable programming languages—not just because of the language itself, but because of its ecosystem and culture. Over the years, Java has evolved into a solid, mature platform, ideal for large-scale, mission-critical systems. It originated as a language for web servers, making it a perfect match for banking and financial applications. In fintech, where accuracy and reliability are paramount, Java’s maturity becomes a crucial asset.
This leads to one of the most obvious reasons fintech companies favor Java: “Java, and its associated frameworks, have reached a level of maturity when dealing with financial processes like payments and investments it’s a vital factor. If you’re building a social media app and make a mistake that causes a customer to lose a comment, thread, or picture, they’ll be disappointed but likely just post again. In fintech, however, you need something that makes it very hard to make mistakes. The language, framework, and architecture of your service all need to support this”.
- Broad Adoption
While Java’s dominance in fintech is clear, it’s important to note that other industries recognize its strengths too. Java isn’t limited to banking. “Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Java runs on more than 850 million personal computers worldwide, and on billions of devices worldwide, including mobile and TV devices.” Source: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/whatis_java.html
So as usual, I did some online searching, but the answers I found were pretty generic, like “it’s secure and fast.” So, as usual, I decided to ask experienced devs for their POVS.
What is the real reason: Why Java?
But what are the real reasons behind this pattern? Why can’t these Fintech companies build their products without Java?
The answer is: They could, but why would they?
As usual, I did some online searching, but the answers I found were pretty generic, like “it’s secure and fast.” So, I decided to ask experienced developers for their perspectives.
Here are 25 Reasons Why Financial Enterprise Companies Use Java:
** Disclaimer: These are experienced developers’ opinions and are not research-based and not in the order of importance**
- Strong, static typing with compile-time and runtime safety.
- Reasonably fast (not as fast as C++, but much faster than interpreted languages)
- Better memory safety than languages that let you manually allocate/deallocate memory.
- Very powerful, fast database manipulation libraries (this is a big one).
- Java was one of the first mainstream GC strongly typed OOP languages. So it got its niche.
- Platform-agnostic.
- Java is like the English language of programming”.
- A large standard library and a huge selection of well-documented open-source libraries
- Java has been one of the main programming languages taught in colleges and universities in the last few decades.
- The Java community has a very large pool of experienced programmers.
- Java is open source and integrates easily with developer observability platforms to quickly identify and respond to issues in a high-transaction environment, preventing issues from reaching prod and damaging user trust and experience.
- Java doesn’t try new things, it lets other languages do that, then picks what works.
- Relatively change-stable compared to other languages.
- Java is robust, versatile, easy to use, less likely to crash and therefore considered a safe choice for mature systems that require maximum security with huge user bases.
- Java/JVM/JIT can achieve runtime optimization on frequently run code, especially on something that’s running as a service so that you avoid the overheads from JVM startup times.
- Much of a company’s framework can be stable Java, with Scala or Clojure-backed business logic.
- Easy to compile and run and it’s not necessary to perform memory checks before running.
- It’s cost-effective — it is cheaper to build and maintain software when using Java. Its robustness allows for complex financial systems to be developed securely and efficiently, meeting regulatory standards while handling large volumes of transactions.
- Backward compatibility and cross-platform compatibility
- It’s cheaper and way less risky (in terms of bugs & development issues) to just work on the old codebase.
- Java is heavily used in FAANG
- Java gets you 500% more peace of mind for 80% of the performance and flexibility.
- Oracle
- Java’s Legacy Migration: Many banks in particular migrated legacy systems to Java in the early 2000’s when it was getting a lot of popularity and the industry was collectively in the midst of a huge OOP fever dream.
- Ideal for backend systems: Java is ideal for backend systems in investment banking,
The main knock against Java
Developer productivity is relatively low compared to other languages. There’s a lot of boilerplate even with the “good” frameworks like Spring Boot, and the fairly primitive type system isn’t as helpful as ones found in more modern languages like Rust or Kotlin. But this isn’t a significant issue if you’re a large financial enterprise with lots of money to hire lots of devs.
Of course, there will always be complainers. As Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, suggested: “There are only two types of languages: those that everyone complains about and those that no one uses.”
Conclusion: Why Financial Enterprise Companies Use Java
Java’s strong position in the financial world comes down to its stability, maturity, and widespread use. It’s secure and fast. What else do you need? What is Digma: A Continuous Feedback platform for Java/Kotlin developers.
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