Replaced a 20-year-old legacy policy administration system for a life insurer, delivering end-to-end lifecycle management for 1M+ policies across life, critical illness, and pension products — retiring a COBOL mainframe and cutting policy issuance time by 60%.
Northern Life Assurance ran on a policy admin system built in 2004 on a COBOL mainframe. The original vendor had entered administration. The system couldn't support modern products, digital distribution, or API connectivity. Agents operated through terminal emulator screens running on Internet Explorer 6-era ActiveX controls. The board mandated full replacement with zero business disruption.
We built PolicyHub in 24 months: a full Java Spring Boot platform covering the entire policy lifecycle across life, critical illness, and pension products for 1M+ policies — including a complete reverse-engineering of 2M lines of undocumented COBOL logic, with 800+ unit tests written before re-implementation began.
The legacy system contained 2M+ lines of COBOL with zero technical documentation and no living engineers who understood the full rule set. Reverse-engineering business logic from code with no tests and no spec was the most complex aspect of the engagement.
Policy data interchange with reinsurers, distributors, and regulators required ACORD 2.x XML compliance. The legacy system used proprietary flat file formats — every partner integration needed re-engineering.
1M+ active policies with ongoing premium payments, claims, and servicing requests couldn't be frozen during migration. A phased approach was required to maintain service continuity throughout a 24-month programme.
Agents operated via ActiveX controls running only in Internet Explorer 6 — a browser 3 major versions behind end-of-life. Any new system had to provide an agent portal that worked in modern browsers with significantly improved usability.
The COBOL system contained 340 distinct actuarial calculation variants covering every product, rating factor, and legacy pricing cohort. Each had to be precisely replicated in Java with verifiable output parity.
Quarterly regulatory reports to the PRA and FCA required manual extraction from the COBOL system and formatting in Excel by a team of 4. The new system needed automated generation and direct API submission.
Full reverse-engineering of all 340 actuarial calculation variants and core policy processing logic from COBOL, with 800+ unit tests written first to codify expected behaviour. Java re-implementation then validated against test suite — no guesswork.
Built a Java ACORD 2.x XML schema library with automated XSD validation and bidirectional transformation. All partner integrations now use ACORD-standard messages, eliminating proprietary format dependencies.
Product-by-product migration: read-only shadow mode (PolicyHub reads but doesn't write) → dual-write (both systems maintained in sync) → cutover (legacy deactivated). Each phase lasted 90 days minimum with reconciliation checks at every stage.
Modern Angular 16 portal with role-based access control, embedded e-signature, document generation, and a dashboard surfacing new business, servicing, and compliance tasks. Agents rated it 4.7/5 in the first month — the legacy system averaged 2.1/5 in exit surveys.
Re-implemented all 340 actuarial calculation variants in Java with a parallel testing harness running both the COBOL and Java engines on the same inputs for 6 months. Zero calculation discrepancies accepted before cutover.
Automated regulatory report generation with direct API submission to the PRA reporting portal. The 4-person manual reporting team was redeployed to higher-value compliance analysis work.
Life product policy migration complete in Year 1. 400K policies live on PolicyHub, legacy system deactivated for life product line. Agent productivity up 2x. Policy issuance time down 60%. First PRA regulatory report auto-generated and submitted.
All 1M+ policies migrated across life, critical illness, and pension products. COBOL mainframe fully decommissioned. £1.1M in annual licensing and hosting savings realised. Zero data loss across the entire migration programme.
Agent productivity 3x vs legacy system. 60% faster policy issuance enabling same-day new business processing. Zero regulatory breaches in the first 12 months on the new system. Northern Life launched 3 new product variants within 6 weeks of full migration — previously impossible on the legacy system.
"PolicyHub is the most complex system modernisation we've ever undertaken. Digivance reverse-engineered 2M lines of undocumented COBOL, migrated 1 million policies without a single data loss incident, and delivered a modern platform that our agents actually love using. The 24-month plan was delivered on time and on budget — something I've never seen on a programme this complex."
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