For much of its history, EMC Insurance resembled many mid-sized insurance carriers - reliable, regionally perceived, and powered by a legacy mainframe quietly running the insurance factory. Six years ago, that model reached its limits, and the company embarked on an ambitious, all-at-once transformation touching every line of business and core system.
“We had nothing but a mainframe backend doing all of our insurance factory things,” said Joe Riesberg (pictured), EMC’s senior vice president and chief information officer. “Policy, billing, claims, premium, loss control – all of it ran off a legacy system.”
Rather than modernizing incrementally, EMC rebuilt its entire core simultaneously: policy, billing, claims, workflows, quote-and-buy portals, and enterprise data. As the program neared completion, it reshaped how the $2 billion-premium carrier operated and how it viewed technology as a competitive necessity.
Large-scale digital transformation is now a common theme across the industry, with carriers modernizing data infrastructure, embracing SaaS platforms, and exploring AI to stay competitive. But EMC’s strategy stood out for its ambition.
“A lot of carriers will do policy, then billing, then claims, or they’ll end up with multiple policy admin systems,” Riesberg said. “What makes EMC unique is, right or wrong, we chose to do it all.”
That was not a cosmetic upgrade; it was a structural overhaul. EMC writes business across more than 40 states and offers a full commercial P&C suite. Partial modernization risked creating fragmentation rather than scalability.
“We’re talking about 10-plus products, 46-plus states,” Riesberg said. “To push an organization with 2,000-plus employees through this amount of change in this short amount of time was truly transformational.”
The effort was significant. Riesberg estimated roughly 10% of annual premium – a substantial figure for any carrier, and one that materially impacted operating results along the way.
“When you talk about initiatives this big, it’s very important that you get the best partners you can,” he said. “It’s also really important that you don’t give away the operations of your organization.”
EMC leaned on external expertise, including PwC as its systems integrator and a broad ecosystem of technology vendors. The technical footprint was vast.
“It’s hundreds of integrations,” Riesberg said. Nothing, unfortunately, is out of the box and standard.”
Despite the scale, EMC resisted ceding control. Riesberg underscored the industry reality: carriers are insurers, not tech firms. But he argued that technology is now core to how carriers operate.
“Fundamentally, an insurance company is an insurance company, not a tech company,” he said. “But the technology we’re changing is a key element of enabling our relationship core competency.”
In the early stages, partners drove much of the work. Over time, EMC deliberately shifted control in-house, restructuring contracts and building internal capability to reduce reliance on costly external statements of work.
“We want to make sure that if the business comes to us tomorrow and says, ‘We want to write a new line of business or enter a new state’, it’s not another statement of work,” Riesberg said. “We have a team in-house that can carry that forward.”
The long-term goal was simplicity at scale: one policy administration system, one general ledger, and a unified, AI-ready data repository.
“From the scale side of it, you want one single source of truth,” he said.
If the technical lift was significant, the human one was tougher.
“There were numerous challenges,” Riesberg said. “Having the support of your board and your strategic leaders is paramount.”
He described moments of vulnerability in which he flagged problems without ready solutions. Trust from EMC’s CEO and board allowed the program to continue through tough periods.
Adoption varied sharply across EMC’s network of offices, even when the same product was deployed in similar environments - highlighting the importance of change management, training, and local leadership.
“That tells you something psychologically,” Riesberg said. To address that, senior leaders spent significant time in the field, explaining the rationale and listening to feedback.
“There were lots of plane rides and windshield time,” he said. “We’d talk about why we were putting people through this painful change – and if they weren’t seeing the benefits, we wanted to hear it.”
“After about a year or two, it changed to ‘now go faster’,” Riesberg said.
Vendor choice and future tech integration
As insurtech and AI adoption evolve, EMC has become more selective about outside partners. “If you can’t integrate directly into our core and workflow, it’s a problem,” he said. “It can’t be yet another bounce-out to another product.”
Advances in AI have also strengthened internal development capabilities, reducing reliance on external tools that lack deep integration.
“The amount of integration needed is really hard to do,” he explained “And our in-house capabilities are far more advanced than they were 10 years ago.”
Technology alone did not sustain change. EMC invested in communications, training, and engagement to ensure teams were informed and equipped to use new systems.
“Tech has lots of jargon and acronyms,” Riesberg said. “Communicating what our users are actually facing is critical.”
Training remained a balancing act in a business where teams also had to serve customers and drive premium.
“It was always a two-way street,” he said. “That’s change management and people.”
Six years on, EMC’s transformation reshaped its operating model and confidence in its capabilities. The journey was neither quick nor clean, but for Riesberg, it was necessary.
“When people talk about digital transformation, I don’t love the buzzwords... But what we’ve gone through – across products, systems, and people – was real.”
