Our client, a leading healthcare and insurance services provider in the US, was watching 20% of its revenue slip away every year and the culprit was hiding in plain sight: an aging, mainframe-based underwriting platform. What should have taken minutes was taking 12 to 15 to generate a single quote, while competitors were doing it in under five. For a business built on pharmacy and healthcare solutions, that gap wasn’t just an inconvenience – it was costing deals. The pain was sharpest during Open Enrollment, when underwriters needed speed most and had it least. On top of the lost business, the legacy system itself was expensive to keep alive, limiting the client’s ability to scale or move forward with any real digital transformation. The client needed a modern member support portal that could keep pace with a fast-moving market and stop the revenue bleeding for good.
Ascendion reimagined the underwriter experience from the ground up, introducing seamless sign-in and web-based reports with advanced filters that put faster, sharper decisions within reach; cutting the time underwriters spent waiting and letting them focus on the work that mattered.
Underneath that experience, Ascendion rebuilt the platform’s foundations – moving from Unix to Linux, Sybase to SQL, and MVC to Kendo Grid, then migrating the entire underwriting application to Azure with continuous database monitoring in place of manual, in-house toolsets. The result gave underwriters near real-time visibility into an employer’s premium history, claims, rebates, and high-dollar claims; everything that shapes a renewal premium, giving both the payer and brokers a sharper edge during underwriting.
Tech Stack:
Impacted 39 million users by modernizing the underwriter application from the ground up.
Delivered a 50% increase in underwriter dashboard performance, making everyday decision-making noticeably faster.
Enabled 1,000+ underwriters to generate a quote in under 5 minutes - down from as long as 15.
Reduced total cost of ownership by $1.5M+ per year by retiring the legacy mainframe system.
Helped 100,000 large group employers get faster quotes and complete enrolment without the wait.
Boosted near real-time search performance by 60%, giving underwriters instant access to the data that matters most.
