From five legacy systems to a single platform: just one Hypercare incident after migrating 250,000 life insurance policies

A leading life insurance organisation faced a significant technology challenge after acquiring a major life insurance portfolio.

The organisation had committed to contractual deadlines for moving the portfolio onto a new policy administration platform.

But the data underpinning the portfolio was complex.

Five legacy systems contained 500,000 rows of reference data supporting hundreds of life insurance products. Business rules were embedded within ageing code and pricing structures. Large volumes of data were also poorly formatted and difficult to reconcile.

The organisation needed to move critical policy information without compromising the integrity of existing policies.

Davidson Technology Consulting provided specialist data migration expertise to establish greater structure, traceability and control around the transition.

Before migration could proceed, the team needed to understand how policy data, business rules and system dependencies worked together.

Davidson Technology Consulting developed a structured migration and reconciliation approach covering data quality and traceability.

The team reviewed data associated with more than 250,000 policies and assessed 120 reference data sheets.

It also analysed policy administration logic and decoded rules embedded within legacy pricing structures. Where required, those rules were rewritten for the new environment.

This work established a more consistent understanding of how policy information was managed across the legacy systems and what needed to be preserved during migration.

For a portfolio containing hundreds of insurance products, that detail mattered. Moving the data alone was not enough. The business logic governing how that information operated also needed to be understood and accounted for.

Data quality was only one part of the migration risk.

With large volumes of information being reviewed and amended, stakeholders also needed visibility of what had changed and why.

Davidson Technology Consulting designed and implemented an audit and control framework that tracked data amendments throughout the migration process.

This established traceability across the program. Changes could be reviewed, validated and audited as migration progressed.

Pricing actuaries and product managers were also involved in reviewing proposed changes and supporting sign-off activities.

Bringing these stakeholders into the process connected technical migration decisions with the people responsible for understanding the products and pricing logic behind the data.

The result was a structured control environment around a complex migration rather than relying on reconciliation at the end of the process.

As the new platform approached implementation, Davidson Technology Consulting supported user acceptance testing to identify and resolve issues before production cutover.

The team then led Hypercare support following deployment, providing additional oversight during the early operational period.

Operational documentation and training were also provided to internal teams to support ongoing management of the platform after the engagement.

These activities extended the migration approach beyond technical cutover. They provided additional controls before deployment and supported the transition into business-as-usual operations.

In the weeks following cutover, the organisation recorded a single Hypercare incident.

This followed a migration involving data associated with more than 250,000 policies, 500,000 rows of reference data and five legacy systems.

The organisation successfully migrated critical policy data to the new policy administration platform. The audit and control framework also provided traceability of data amendments throughout the migration process.

Together, these results demonstrate the value of treating data migration as a controlled business transition rather than a technical transfer alone.

The organisation reached a significant milestone in its broader transition program with critical policy information migrated and a structured approach to validating and tracking changes.

Complex data migrations carry risk because organisations are not simply moving records. They are transferring the information and business logic that existing operations depend on.

For this life insurer, that meant understanding hundreds of products, legacy pricing rules and data associated with more than 250,000 policies before cutover.

Davidson Technology Consulting combined migration expertise, reconciliation, governance and operational support to help manage that complexity.

The result was a controlled transition to the new policy administration platform, with only one Hypercare incident recorded in the weeks following cutover.

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