Modernising an Industry Built on Legacy
The insurance industry is built on trust, long-term policy relationships, and decades of historical data. But that legacy comes at a cost. Many insurers are still running policy administration systems (PAS) or claims platforms that are 10, 20 or even 30 years old and some still hosted on-premise or stitched together after rounds of mergers and acquisitions.
Each acquisition, each system upgrade, and each new product line adds another layer of complexity. The result is a patchwork of disconnected systems, overlapping data models, and an ever-growing pile of technical debt.
“Legacy systems often carry data that’s become scrappier over time,” explains Owen Greenwood, Client Partner for Insurance at Dufrain. “Governance breaks down, manual interventions creep in, and quality suffers. If you want to be a high-performing modern insurer, you need to be operating off a modern data platform.”
Why Migration Matters Now
Modern insurers need flexibility, scalability, and control, three things that legacy PAS and claims platforms struggle to deliver. Whether it’s Acturis, Guidewire, or bespoke mainframe systems, the reality is that outdated tech can’t keep pace with customer expectations or regulatory scrutiny.
Migrating to a modern, unified data platform enables insurers to:
- Reduce operational risk and exposure from aging systems
- Meet tightening data-governance and security obligations
- Consolidate fragmented M&A estates into one consistent view
- Support digital experiences and data-driven underwriting
- Prepare data foundations for AI, analytics, and automation
“Migration gives you the flexibility and scalability modern insurers need,” says Owen. “And it removes the risks that come from old systems and patchwork fixes.”
The M&A Challenge: Many Systems, One Truth
Few industries experience as many mergers and acquisitions activity as insurance. Consolidation brings growth, but also enormous data headaches. Multiple policy systems, overlapping customer records, duplicate claims histories, and inconsistent product hierarchies all make achieving a single view of the customer difficult.
“Most insurers we work with have grown through acquisition,” Owen notes. “That leaves them with a complex technical environment, different PAS, different reporting tools, and data scattered across systems. Migration is what brings it all together.”
A well-planned migration can rationalise that estate, decommission redundant technology, and create a modern platform that supports both legacy books and new digital products side by side.
What to Migrate and Why Pragmatism Wins
One of the first and most important questions every insurer face: what should we migrate?
Historically, migrations aimed to move everything – decades of historic data included. Today, the approach is shifting.
“Clients are being more pragmatic,” Owen says. “They’re asking whether they really need to move 20 years of dormant policy data, or if they can focus on live business first.”
This phased, future-focused mindset reduces cost and shortens delivery times. Migrating live policies and claims data first delivers early benefits, while legacy data can remain in read-only repositories until it’s safe and economical to retire. It’s a strategy that balances commercial reality with long-term simplification.
Before You Start: Three Things Every Insurer Should Do
Before embarking on a migration project, insurers need a clear understanding of both where they are today and where they’re trying to go. Owen distils it into three essentials:
1. Audit your data estate – properly.
Start with a forensic data audit. Map every source, dataset and dependency: from PAS and claims systems to broker portals and finance data. Identify what’s regulated, what’s duplicated, and what’s critical for BAU.
“One insurer we’re working with spent six months purely on data discovery,” Owen says. “It completely changed their view of the right migration path.”
Without this step, insurers risk under-estimating complexity, or worse, moving flawed data into their new environment.
2. Define your strategic drivers.
What’s the real business case? Reducing cost? Enabling AI? Improving customer experience? Clarify this early.
A migration to Acturis, for example, will look very different if the driver is regulatory simplification versus innovation and product speed-to-market.
“Migration shouldn’t be a technology exercise,” Owen emphasises. “It has to align with the business objectives, whether that’s single-customer view, efficiency, or data-driven product design.”
3. Set your governance and target standards early.
Migration is the perfect moment to enforce consistency. Define data lineage, ownership and quality controls before you move anything.
A unified governance model ensures migrated data is accurate, compliant and AI-ready removing the need for costly remediation later.
Post-Migration Pay-Off
Once migration is complete, the benefits are immediate. A single, modern platform simplifies operations, strengthens governance, and unlocks faster reporting and decision-making.
“When your data’s unified, it’s simply easier to manage and turn into business value,” says Owen. “We’re seeing insurers use that foundation for everything from better loss-ratio reporting to AI-driven underwriting support.”
In one example, Dufrain helped a major UK insurer consolidate multiple policy systems into a single modern platform, cutting operational cost and improving data accuracy by over 99%. That level of precision isn’t rare: it’s the benchmark Dufrain sets for every project.
Why Industry Expertise Matters
Migrating insurance data isn’t like moving CRM records or marketing lists. Policy data, claims data, and regulatory records are deeply intertwined and highly sensitive. A partner without insurance-specific knowledge risks introducing errors that could impact compliance or customer trust.
“We’ve delivered hundreds of migrations into systems like Acturis,” Owen says. “We know the data structures, we have reusable artefacts, and that accelerates delivery while reducing risk.”
That combination of deep sector understanding and technical engineering is what enables Dufrain to deliver secure, accurate and compliant migrations for leading insurers across the UK and Europe.
The Final Word
Data migrations in insurance are intricate, challenging and vital. They’re like assembling a 50,000-piece puzzle … but when the pieces click, the result is transformation.
“They’re complicated, but we’re very good at them,” says Owen. “It’s about solving the puzzle in a way that fits each client’s strategy.”
In an industry where trust is everything, getting your data foundations right isn’t optional. It’s the key to resilience, innovation and a future-proof, AI-ready enterprise.
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