Provinzial catalogued four decades of P&C underwriting and claims rules from the merged COBOL estate.

Provinzial Holding AG, the second-largest German public insurer aligned with the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, was formed in 2020 from the merger of Provinzial NordWest in Münster and Provinzial Rheinland in Düsseldorf. The merger brought together two independently developed COBOL estates — each carrying around four decades of accumulated motor, home, liability and reinsurance logic — under a single underwriting and IT organisation.

COBOLpro catalogued the business rules embedded in both estates: rating tables for motor and household, claims-adjudication logic, reinsurance treaty handling, fraud indicators, and the Solvency II reportable elements that sit across all of them. Each rule was extracted from source, validated with subject-matter experts, and tagged with its origin so that the two pre-merger lineages remain traceable.

The catalogue is now used jointly by underwriting product owners, IT change teams, and compliance — providing a single view of how the merged entity actually prices, reserves and reports, and giving programme leadership a defensible inventory for downstream platform decisions.