I can’t remark on COBOL, but I did contracting for a time to non-US insurance company replacing their Universe Basic system originally written in the mid 90s, with a .NET Core (3.1 had just come out at the time, around 2019) based system.

The system contained records of all their policies including all the premium factors (e.g. make, model, year of car, parking location, physical address, etc). These premium factors were then fed into a rating engine which would use actuarial tables with custom actuarial defined algorithms to determine premiums.

In insurance companies, working out the correct premium is core to everything. Insurance companies can have lots of different products and their competitive edge comes from how well they structure their offerings and determine the correct premiums based on risk factors. One does not simply rewrite such a thing.

Couple of things I thought were a bit interesting about the place:

- Their single server running Universe Basic (with a hot spare I believe) had 4TB of RAM. - While I was used to the devs being the stars of the show at the consulting house I worked at, at insurance companies it’s the actuaries.