Insurance System Overhaul for Stability & Efficiency

About the Client

A Top-Tier South African Insurer, the client is one of the country’s largest and best providers of financial services, offering a broad portfolio including personal lines, business insurance, and value-added products. Their ongoing strategic goal is to move away from expensive, skill-limited legacy systems to a modern, agile tech stack that enables rapid product development and seamless third-party integrations.

The Challenge

The client’s legacy systems, while functional, were becoming a major competitive burden. They required expensive licensing and relied on a dwindling pool of niche developers. To solve this, the client initiated a critical rewrite for their micro-insurance portfolio, intending to create a modern, efficient system for sales, collections, and administration.

However, the rewrite quickly stalled. When Runninghill took over, the project was already six months late (on top of an original two-year timeline), and the partially built system was riddled with fundamental issues:

• Performance: It was slow, unstable, and unresponsive.
• Quality: It lacked proper design patterns (SOLID, n-tier), leading to inconsistent behaviour and a rapidly growing backlog of unresolved bugs.
• Business Risk: The flailing project risked becoming another costly bottleneck, delaying the client’s strategic move toward faster speed to market and easier third-party integrations.

The Solution

Runninghill was tasked with a project rescue, transforming the flawed code into a production-ready High-Performance Micro-Insurance Platform. The focus was not on new features but on radical stability, quality, and resilience.

• Technology Stack Consolidation and Stabilization: Instead of a full rewrite, the team modified and stabilized the existing technology stack, applying proper design principles (SOLID, n-tier) to ensure cleaner code, easier maintenance, and quicker future product development. Over 130 existing services were refactored into a consistent, standardised template, introducing rigorous standards for validation, exception handling, caching, and standardisation.
• Front-End Optimization: Core bottlenecks were addressed by splitting and optimising components. Advanced techniques like lazy loading and intelligent bundling reduced file sizes and initial load times, directly enabling the client to deliver a modern, rapid user experience.
• Business Enablement: By introducing structure and standardisation, the team ensured the new platform would enable quicker and more configurable product development, making it easier to integrate with third-parties and freeing the client from legacy constraints.

The Process

Runninghill’s recovery process began with an intensive audit phase focused on understanding the stakeholder and technical pain points.

1. Stakeholder Alignment: We first identified the highest priorities for the key stakeholders: stability, system response time, and core functionality. This immediate focus ensured the technical work would deliver immediate, measurable business value.
2. System Audit & Roadmap: The team then conducted a deep dive into the system’s architecture, monitoring, and logging. This led to a structured plan outlining the minimal, high-impact fixes needed to achieve stability and production readiness within the tight constraints.
3. Development Lifecycle Improvements: We introduced strict branching strategies, mandatory code review, and an approval process. This disciplined approach helped preemptively resolve issues and enforce code standards, building confidence in the platform’s quality.

The Results & Impact

• Drastic Performance Improvement: Initial page load was reduced from over 20 seconds to sub-second loads. This demonstrates the platform’s high-performance capability and ensures the final production system will support a rapid, efficient sales process necessary for high conversion rates.
• Code Quality & Consistency: Refactored over 130 services into a consistent, robust standard. By standardising the services with proper validation and exception handling, the foundation is now reliable, making future feature development faster, cheaper, and less prone to introducing new bugs.
• Front-End Efficiency: Reduced the main front-end bundle size by 50% (from 18 megabytes to 9 megabytes). This optimization directly contributes to the faster load times and lowers the bandwidth requirements for users accessing the platform.
• System Stability Achieved: Cleared the bug backlog and introduced system-wide stability and resilience. This resolved fundamental architectural flaws, giving the client confidence in their data and the system’s ability to handle production-level traffic.
• Confidence in Technology: Improved deployment time and successfully validated the new technology stack as a Proof of Concept (POC). This outcome proved the client’s strategic vision to move away from legacy systems is viable and provides a robust, proven architecture for the final build.

Looking Ahead

Runninghill successfully rescued a flailing project, transforming a chaotic, unstable codebase into a modern, high-performance platform. This successful Proof of Concept validated the client’s strategic decision to move away from legacy systems and proved that the new technological approach delivers on the promise of speed and stability. As a long-term partner, Runninghill continues to support the client’s strategic move across multiple systems, with the insights and architecture from this recovery project now informing the ongoing full-scale build.

About Runninghill Software Development

Established in 2013, Runninghill Software Development is among South Africa’s fastest-growing BBBEE Level 2 companies within the Information Technology Sector. With over 50 full-stack developers specialising in finance, banking, fintech, and more, we help companies design, build, and ship amazing products.

We are passionate software developers who deliver world-class solutions using the best tools in the industry. We focus on technical team augmentation, consulting, and agentic solution design, and we partner with the best design agencies so we can focus on what we do best: technical excellence.

Our services include:

• Technical Consultation: We partner with your business to identify opportunities, solve complex challenges, and design strategic technology roadmaps that drive growth and digital transformation.
• AI-enabled Technical Team Augmentation: We provide skilled developers and technical experts who integrate seamlessly with your existing team to accelerate project delivery and fill capability gaps.
• Agents as a Service (AaaS): We design, build, and deploy intelligent AI agents that work autonomously within your business processes, creating a digital workforce that handles complex tasks while you focus on strategy.

FAQ’s

1. What was the primary goal of the system overhaul?
   The main goal was to transform a failing, unstable project into a stable, high-performance platform that could serve as a successful Proof of Concept (POC) for the client’s long-term strategy of moving away from expensive, resource-limited legacy systems.
2. How critical was the performance improvement?
   Extremely critical. Reducing the initial page load from over 20 seconds to sub-second not only validated the new architecture but also ensured that the final production system will support a rapid, efficient sales process necessary for high conversion rates.
3. Why was the project failing initially?
   The initial rewrite lacked proper design principles (like SOLID and n-tier architecture), leading to slow system response, instability, and a massive backlog of inconsistent, non-functional implementations.
4. What does “refactored over 130 services” mean for the client?
   It means that the foundation of the platform is now reliable and easy to maintain. By standardising the services with proper validation and exception handling, future feature development becomes faster, cheaper, and less prone to introducing new bugs.
5. What is the strategic impact of this successful POC?
   The successful recovery and performance validation means the client now has a proven, modern foundation that enables much faster speed to market for new products and makes integrations with third parties significantly easier, future-proofing their core business operations.
6. What is the difference between team augmentation and technical consulting?
   Team augmentation means we add developers directly into your team to extend capacity or bring in specific skills. Technical consulting means we work with you at a strategic level to solve architecture, scalability, or process problems. Some clients need both. Knowing when to use each helps improve speed and outcomes. For more on these models, see our services.
7. How quickly can Runninghill’s augmented teams start delivering value?
   Because we use skilled developers from South Africa who are used to working in modern workflows, and because we build quality and modular design into what we deliver, you can expect meaningful contributions early. Feature work, bug fixes, or UI tweaks often happen within the first few sprints. And over time, the system becomes easier to maintain.
8. Why partner with Runninghill in South Africa?
   You get talent that is technically skilled, smart at solving hard problems, and used to operating in high-standard environments. Our developers train deeply in technical skills, learn best practices, and are supported by mentorship and a culture of quality. We deliver augmentation, but we also help clients build lasting platforms; not just quick wins.