They probably had their own Banking industry in mind. This was in Argentina so YMMV. Back in 2010 i had friends in university looking for internships and first jobs and COBOL was a real prospect. A friend took a deal with accenture where they would give you a 2 month-ish course and then send you to consult for banks. I remember the whole "COBOL devs are retiring! salaries are gonna be huge!" which was likely to be true for the agency's rate but didn't trickle down to coders, they used to make as much as the lower rung of IT (QA tester, etc). Later in life I worked at a bank and met the fabled close to retirement AS400/Cobol developer. He didn't make more than any ssr developer with a modern stack in demand.