What the Client Was Facing
A large insurance company's core policy administration system was a 25-year-old COBOL mainframe handling £2B of annual premiums. New features took 18 months to deliver, integration with modern systems required expensive COBOL contractors and the business was losing market share to insurtechs.
What ZippyOPS Was Engaged To Do
ZippyOPS was brought in to design and implement a solution addressing the root causes of the client's challenges — delivering measurable outcomes within a fixed engagement timeline. Our team worked embedded with the client's engineers throughout the entire project.
How We Solved It
ZippyOPS designed a Strangler Fig migration strategy — wrapping the mainframe behind an API gateway and incrementally building new microservices to take over functionality domain by domain. Event streaming via Kafka synchronised state between old and new systems during transition. The policy issuance domain was migrated first, delivering in 16 weeks.
Technologies Used
Measurable Outcomes Delivered
Policy issuance domain migrated — new feature delivery reduced from 18 months to 6 weeks
Mainframe operating costs reduced 35% as workloads moved off
API gateway layer enabling integration with 4 new insurtech partners within 6 months
Migration programme board-approved for full completion
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