It's well known that Financial companies are generally among the worst places for programmers to work. Learning COBOL just sets you up for a lot of that.
Finance is a very very broad industry. Everything from Xero to your local credit union/building society to bulge bracket investment banks fall into 'finance'. I work for a bulge bracket IB, and all of the developers enjoy their work because it's what you would expect working at a technology company; maintaining an in house document store, implementing complex mathematical models and implementing distributed graph based pricing systems for real time data are all things I've had the opportunity to do here, and everyone is payed at market rate or higher for their experience.
It's a great industry to be in if you work in the right area, just like any industry.
Well known by whom? Sure it's Enterprise-y and you'll be in a cubicle. You'll also have a very secure position, reasonable working hours and demands, and work at a place with the financial resources to compensate you at market rate (or above).
There are a lot of places where it is a lot worse to be a programmer than a bank.
