Back in the mid aughties (circa 2006) I was doing risk analysis at a big bank. The kind of international bank that you read about on a regular basis in the news. Our team supported synthetic bond-backed collateral debt obligations, and this was all principal finance, so the bank investing its own money. We didn't have clients that we had to support. But we did have to generate our risk profile each night and FTP it to the central server.

And it was all done in a Excel spreadsheet.

Each night a bunch of traders would each kick off scripts in Excel. The script would download the new ratings (S&P, Fitch, and Moodys) for each bond, download the new LIBOR curves, update the spreadsheet, save a copy (y'know, for backup purposes and history), then generate an XML file, shell out to the risk tool provided by the quants, then parse the XML result, load it back into the spreadsheet, let it crunch and then FTP it to the central risk server.

Each deal was a separate spreadsheet, and there were about 30 of these deals. Some of the runs would take ~20 hours, so they were basically always running, but most of them took about an hour. The sheets were a spaghetti mess of formulas, often with errors or inexplicably different formulas.

I also am cynical, and I can't imaging supporting something with even more programming ability.