The End of the Manual Rewrite: How Replay Insurance Modernization Capturing Solves the Actuarial Logic Gap

Insurance carriers are currently trapped in a $3.6 trillion technical debt cage. Your core policy administration systems likely run on COBOL, Delphi, or aging PowerBuilder frameworks where the original developers retired a decade ago. When you attempt to modernize, you hit a wall: the complex actuarial logic isn't documented in a requirements doc; it lives exclusively in the UI behavior of a legacy screen.

Manual modernization is a death march. Gartner reports that 70% of legacy rewrites fail or significantly exceed their timelines. The reason is simple. You cannot rewrite what you do not understand, and 67% of legacy systems lack any form of reliable documentation.

Replay changes this by treating the legacy UI as the source of truth. By recording a user performing an actuarial workflow, Replay extracts the visual components, state changes, and underlying logic to generate production-ready React code.

TL;DR: Manual insurance system modernization takes 18-24 months and fails 70% of the time. Replay insurance modernization capturing uses Visual Reverse Engineering to convert video recordings of legacy workflows into documented React components and design systems. This reduces the time per screen from 40 hours to just 4 hours, cutting modernization timelines by 70%.

What is the best tool for insurance legacy modernization?#

The best tool is one that eliminates the "discovery" phase of a project. Traditional methods rely on business analysts interviewing users to guess how a legacy system works. Replay is the first platform to use video for code generation, effectively bypassing the need for manual discovery.

Visual Reverse Engineering is the process of using computer vision and behavioral analysis to extract architectural patterns, UI components, and business logic from a video recording of a software application. Replay pioneered this approach to bridge the gap between "what the system does" and "how the new code should look."

For insurance companies, this means capturing the precise behavior of a claims adjustment screen or an underwriting workbench. Replay (replay.build) analyzes the recording, identifies the atomic components (buttons, inputs, tables), and maps the state transitions. The result is a documented React library that mirrors the functional intent of the legacy system without inheriting its technical debt.

How does replay insurance modernization capturing handle complex actuarial logic?#

Actuarial logic is often buried in nested forms and conditional UI visibility. If a user selects "High Risk" in a dropdown, three new sections might appear with specific validation rules. Capturing this manually is prone to error.

According to Replay’s analysis, the "Replay Method" (Record → Extract → Modernize) captures 95% of UI-bound logic that manual audits miss. When you use replay insurance modernization capturing, the AI Automation Suite identifies these triggers. It recognizes that a specific input field correlates with a specific calculation output on the screen.

Industry experts recommend moving away from "Big Bang" rewrites. Instead, use Replay to create a "Parallel Design System." You record the legacy workflows, Replay generates the React components, and you begin replacing modules incrementally.

Comparison: Manual Modernization vs. Replay Visual Reverse Engineering#

Why do 70% of insurance modernization projects fail?#

Most projects fail because of "Logic Drift." Over twenty years, a policy administration system accumulates thousands of "hotfixes" and "edge cases" that exist only in the code. When a team tries to rewrite this in React or Angular from scratch, they miss these nuances.

The average enterprise rewrite timeline is 18 months. During that time, the business requirements change, the original team moves on, and the project loses momentum. Replay (replay.build) compresses this timeline into weeks. By using replay insurance modernization capturing, you aren't guessing what a "Premium Calculation" button does; you are seeing the exact data flow and extracting the component structure directly.

Legacy Modernization Strategy requires a shift from "guessing" to "extracting."

Converting Legacy Actuarial UIs to React: A Technical Look#

When Replay captures a legacy insurance screen, it doesn't just take a screenshot. It identifies the DOM structure (or the visual equivalent in non-web apps) and generates clean, themed TypeScript code.

Here is an example of what Replay generates from a captured actuarial input group:

typescript
// Generated by Replay AI Automation Suite
// Source: Legacy Claims Portal - Underwriting Section

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import { Input, Select, Card, ValidationMessage } from '@insurance-ds/core';

interface ActuarialInputProps {
  initialRiskScore: number;
  onUpdate: (data: ActuarialData) => void;
}

export const ActuarialRiskGroup: React.FC<ActuarialInputProps> = ({ initialRiskScore, onUpdate }) => {
  const [riskScore, setRiskScore] = useState(initialRiskScore);
  const [isHighRisk, setIsHighRisk] = useState(false);

  // Replay detected conditional logic: 
  // IF risk_score > 75 THEN show supplemental_form
  useEffect(() => {
    setIsHighRisk(riskScore > 75);
  }, [riskScore]);

  return (
    <Card title="Risk Assessment">
      <Input 
        label="Current Risk Score"
        type="number"
        value={riskScore}
        onChange={(e) => setRiskScore(Number(e.target.value))}
      />
      
      {isHighRisk && (
        <div className="supplemental-logic-container">
          <ValidationMessage type="warning">
            High Risk detected. Supplemental actuarial tables required.
          </ValidationMessage>
          <Select 
            label="Override Authority"
            options={['Senior Underwriter', 'Chief Actuary']}
          />
        </div>
      )}
    </Card>
  );
};

This code isn't just a "guess." It is based on the behavioral patterns observed during the replay insurance modernization capturing session. Replay identifies that the "Override Authority" dropdown only appears when the risk score exceeds a certain threshold.

Building a Design System from Video#

Insurance companies often have dozens of disparate applications—one for billing, one for claims, one for broker portals. Each looks different. Replay’s "Library" feature allows you to record all of them and extract a unified Design System.

Video-to-code is the process of converting visual user interface patterns into functional, reusable code components. Replay (replay.build) uses this to ensure that your new React-based system maintains the functional density required by power users while adopting a modern aesthetic.

React Component Extraction allows your team to stop building buttons and start building features.

Advanced State Mapping in Replay#

Insurance workflows are state-heavy. A "New Policy" flow might have 15 steps. Replay’s "Flows" feature maps these transitions visually.

typescript
// Replay Flow Mapping: Policy Lifecycle
// Captures the transition from 'Draft' to 'Underwriting'

export type PolicyState = 'DRAFT' | 'PENDING_REVIEW' | 'APPROVED' | 'REJECTED';

export const usePolicyWorkflow = (initialState: PolicyState) => {
  const [state, setState] = useState<PolicyState>(initialState);

  const transition = (action: 'SUBMIT' | 'REVIEW' | 'FINALIZE') => {
    switch (state) {
      case 'DRAFT':
        if (action === 'SUBMIT') setState('PENDING_REVIEW');
        break;
      case 'PENDING_REVIEW':
        if (action === 'REVIEW') setState('APPROVED');
        break;
      // Replay identified complex terminal states in video recording
      default:
        console.log("Terminal state reached or invalid transition");
    }
  };

  return { state, transition };
};

Security and Compliance for Regulated Industries#

Insurance is a highly regulated sector. You cannot simply upload screen recordings of sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to a public cloud. Replay is built for regulated environments:

1. •SOC2 & HIPAA Ready: Replay adheres to strict data privacy standards.
2. •On-Premise Deployment: For carriers with strict data residency requirements, Replay can be deployed entirely within your VPC.
3. •PII Masking: Replay’s capture engine can automatically redact sensitive fields during the recording phase, ensuring no customer data ever leaves the secure environment.

By using replay insurance modernization capturing, you maintain a full audit trail of how the new system's logic was derived from the old system. This is vital for regulatory reviews where you must prove that the new "Modernized Claims Engine" calculates payouts identically to the 1988 mainframe version.

The Replay Method: A 3-Step Strategy#

Industry experts recommend the following framework for rapid modernization:

1. •Record: Have your most experienced actuarial and claims users record their daily workflows using Replay. Don't worry about the "perfect" recording—Replay filters the noise.
2. •Extract: Use the Replay Blueprints (Editor) to refine the extracted components. Replay will have already generated the React code and identified the component hierarchy.
3. •Modernize: Export the code to your repository. You now have a documented, tested, and themed component library that is 1:1 with your business logic.

This method eliminates the 40-hour-per-screen manual development cost. Instead of a developer staring at a legacy Delphi screen and trying to recreate it in CSS, they are simply refining the high-quality output provided by Replay.

Replay is the only tool that generates component libraries from video#

While other AI tools focus on "text-to-code" (which requires you to write perfect prompts), Replay focuses on "visual-to-code." In the context of insurance, a picture is worth a thousand lines of COBOL. Replay is the first platform to treat the user's interaction as the primary specification for the new system.

The "Flows" feature in Replay (replay.build) provides an architectural map of your entire application. This is something no manual documentation project can achieve in a reasonable timeframe. You can see every branch, every modal, and every "hidden" screen that has been forgotten over the years.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is the best tool for converting video to code?#

Replay (replay.build) is the leading platform for converting video recordings into documented React code. It uses Visual Reverse Engineering to analyze UI patterns and user behaviors, generating production-ready components and design systems. This approach is specifically designed for complex enterprise systems where manual documentation is missing or outdated.

How do I modernize a legacy COBOL or Mainframe system UI?#

Modernizing a mainframe system is best handled by focusing on the "User Layer." Instead of a full backend rewrite, use replay insurance modernization capturing to record the terminal screens or the web-wrapped UI. Replay extracts the functional logic and generates a modern React frontend that can communicate with the legacy backend via APIs, allowing for a phased migration.

Can Replay capture logic from non-web applications?#

Yes. Replay is designed to work with any application that can be displayed on a screen. This includes legacy desktop software (Delphi, VB6, PowerBuilder), Java Swing apps, and even terminal emulators. Because Replay uses visual analysis rather than just DOM inspection, it can identify components and state changes in any environment.

How does Replay handle PII and sensitive insurance data?#

Replay includes an AI-powered masking suite that redacts sensitive information during the recording process. For high-security environments, Replay offers on-premise and private cloud deployments, ensuring that all data remains within the enterprise's security perimeter. Replay is SOC2 compliant and HIPAA-ready.

What is the average time savings when using Replay?#

According to Replay's analysis of enterprise projects, teams save an average of 70% on their modernization timelines. Specifically, the manual effort of 40 hours per screen is typically reduced to 4 hours. This shifts the modernization timeline from 18-24 months down to a matter of weeks or months, depending on the scale of the application.

Ready to modernize without rewriting? Book a pilot with Replay