Emergent Software works with finance and insurance organizations to improve the technology their employees and customers depend on. Technology in these industries has to carry a lot of weight. Public-facing platforms need to be fast and easy to manage. Internal systems need to stay secure, available, and compliant. Modernization has to move the organization forward without disrupting the work already happening.
In this client story roundup, we’re walking through five finance and insurance client wins, across:
Each project started with a different problem, but all five show what can happen when the technology behind a finance or insurance organization is built and supported to keep pace with the business.
Burford Capital: Modernizing a Global Website with Umbraco
For a company like Burford Capital, a website has a lot of different audiences to serve.
The global legal finance and asset management company is publicly traded on both the New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange, with offices across the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Investors use the site. Clients use it. Journalists use it. Internal teams rely on it to publish a steady stream of insights and information for audiences around the world.
Over time, that adds up to a lot of content.
By the time Burford partnered with Emergent Software, its Umbraco website had grown to more than 2,200 pages. The platform had served the organization through years of growth, but Burford was ready for an experience that reflected the scale and sophistication of the company today.
That meant thinking about the people managing the site just as much as the people visiting it.
Burford needed a simpler way to handle regional content without duplicating pages, a cleaner tagging system, and a more flexible editing experience. The team also wanted to bring gated resources and Marketo forms into a more consistent workflow so authors could manage content without needing developer help each time.
Meanwhile, the public-facing experience needed to keep pace with Burford’s global brand. Content had to be easy to find, pages needed to perform well across regions, and the site needed a structure that search engines could understand just as easily as users could.
Emergent partnered with Burford on a full redesign, CMS upgrade, and migration of those 2,200-plus pages.
A new component-based architecture in Umbraco gave authors a library of reusable, branded content blocks they could combine to build pages without recreating layouts from scratch. A live preview feature allowed them to see what content would look like before publishing, while the underlying components helped preserve design consistency across the site.
Regional publishing also became much easier. Emergent built localization logic that allowed content to adjust based on geography while using intelligent fallbacks for shared elements. Burford could provide relevant articles, insights, and staff information to different audiences without maintaining unnecessary copies of the same content.
Marketo became part of that same editing experience. Authors can manage gated PDFs and lead-capture forms directly within Umbraco, deciding which resources require a form without relying on developers to configure each one separately.
Then came the migration itself.
Moving more than 2,200 pages is the kind of project where seemingly small details can become very large problems. Emergent used custom scripts to automate much of the migration and clean up the site's tagging structure, while the QA team manually reviewed pages, links, and forms. Images were reorganized and optimized, and Cloudflare was introduced to improve performance for Burford’s global audience.
The results showed up in the numbers. Following the modernization, total site traffic increased 55%, non-paid traffic increased 70%, and interactions with gated content rose 10% year over year.
The editing experience also earned industry recognition. The Burford project received Umbraco’s 2024 Best Editing Experience award at Codegarden, selected from nearly 100 submissions from agencies around the world.
For Burford, the project created a site that better supports both sides of publishing at global scale. Visitors get a faster, more relevant experience, while internal teams have much more control over how quickly and consistently they can get information out into the world.
That matters when your website isn’t simply a marketing channel. It is also part investor resource, part publishing platform, part lead-generation system, and part front door to a global organization.
Learn more about website development and design.
Financial Services Organization: Strengthening Security with Microsoft Cloud
Security in financial services has an interesting tendency: every new requirement can come with another tool or another process. Over time, the environment can become complicated to manage.
One financial services organization partnered with Emergent while operating primarily on established on-premises infrastructure. Those systems had supported the company well, but expectations around security, availability, compliance, and access had continued to evolve.
The internal team was being asked to do more at the same time. Controls needed to be applied consistently, audits required stronger documentation, and employees still needed reliable access to the systems they used every day. A collection of tools and platforms had also accumulated over time, creating more overhead for both users and IT.
The organization saw an opportunity to modernize before that complexity became harder to unwind.
Emergent began with discovery, including site visits and a formal assessment of infrastructure, dependencies, and security risks. Rather than treating security as a list of products to deploy, the team built a phased roadmap around the parts of the environment that mattered most.
Identity was one of the first priorities.
Multi-factor authentication through Microsoft Authenticator added another layer of protection to user accounts, while Conditional Access policies allowed access decisions to account for things like identity, device posture, and risk. Instead of assuming that a valid username and password should always equal access, the environment moved closer to a Zero Trust model in which access could be continuously evaluated.
Microsoft Sentinel gave the organization a clearer view of what was happening across the environment. Security signals from identity, endpoints, and cloud infrastructure could be brought together rather than investigated separately, giving the team a central place to monitor and respond to suspicious activity.
Those security improvements happened alongside a broader move to Microsoft Azure.
Using Azure Migrate and a structured landing zone, Emergent helped transition infrastructure into the cloud while modernizing other parts of the environment. Azure Files supported file services, Azure Virtual Desktop provided remote desktop capabilities, and Microsoft Teams Voice replaced older communication infrastructure. Legacy systems could be retired as their modern replacements came online.
Backup and recovery received attention too, including cloud-based and immutable backup strategies designed around both business continuity and compliance needs.
What changed most, however, was not any single piece of technology. The organization moved from managing security as a collection of individual tasks toward managing it as an ongoing program.
Emergent continues to support the environment through managed services, including monitoring, patching, security policy refinement, and advisory support as requirements change.
That has produced practical improvements. Incident volumes have decreased, patching is more consistent, the organization’s Microsoft Secure Score has improved, and teams have better visibility into the controls protecting their environment.
It has also made conversations around audits and cyber insurance easier. When someone asks how access is controlled, how systems are monitored, or how data is protected, the answers are backed by a much more standardized environment.
In financial services, where security requirements do not stop changing once a project is complete, that ongoing structure matters just as much as the initial modernization.
Learn more about Microsoft cloud security.
Specialized Services Company: Stabilizing and Modernizing a Critical Application
A specialized services company relied on a custom-built application to support core day-to-day operations.
The web platform helped employees manage investigations, process claims, and coordinate financial recovery related to damaged infrastructure. As the company added clients, entered new markets, and expanded its services, more and more of the business came to depend on it.
The application itself had been built with ASP.NET Web Forms and hosted on-premises. It was still doing important work, but the codebase carried years of accumulated complexity. Performance issues and instability had become harder to ignore, and duplicated logic made seemingly straightforward changes more difficult than they needed to be.
A complete replacement might sound like the obvious answer. In practice, ripping out a system that sits at the center of revenue-generating operations is rarely that simple.
The business still needed to run while modernization happened.
Emergent started by learning the application before trying to reinvent it. The team reviewed the codebase, mapped important business logic, identified performance bottlenecks, and prioritized the changes that would improve stability without creating unnecessary disruption.
That became the beginning of a long-term managed application support relationship.
Emergent took responsibility for ongoing bug fixes, enhancements, server monitoring, patching, and infrastructure support. Multi-factor authentication strengthened access to the environment, while targeted refactoring gradually made the existing code easier to maintain.
Over time, the work expanded beyond keeping the lights on.
Emergent introduced new functionality, helped build additional applications using modern frameworks such as React, improved mobile capabilities for people working in the field, and supported a partial transition into Microsoft Azure. Data warehousing and analytics initiatives began to take shape alongside the application work.
Modernization happened incrementally because that was what made sense for the business.
Some parts of the legacy environment continued doing their job. Other parts were improved, rebuilt, or moved to newer technologies as priorities and resources allowed. The organization could keep serving customers while steadily reducing technical risk.
There was another benefit that became increasingly important as the relationship continued: Emergent learned the business.
Over years of development and support, the team built a deep understanding of how the application was supposed to behave and why certain processes worked the way they did. As leadership changed and internal subject matter experts moved on, that knowledge provided continuity.
In some cases, employees began turning to Emergent not simply with technical questions, but with questions about how a workflow had historically been designed to function.
Hundreds of enhancements have been delivered over the course of the relationship, while system stability has improved significantly. The organization has expanded geographically, including into international markets, without leaving its core platform behind.
It is a useful reminder that application modernization does not always need a dramatic before-and-after moment. Sometimes the right approach is to stabilize what you have, improve it where it matters, modernize in pieces, and give the business room to keep moving while you do it.
Learn more about application support services.
Growing Credit Union: Improving SQL Server Reliability
A growing credit union had a capable internal IT team and a sophisticated SQL Server environment.
What it didn’t have was a reason to employ a full-time database administrator.
That distinction matters.
SQL Server may run quietly in the background most days, but a database issue can quickly become everybody’s issue when it affects a system employees or members depend on. And when the environment includes availability groups, compliance retention requirements, backups, permissions, performance tuning, and high-availability configurations, database administration becomes its own specialty.
The credit union wanted access to that specialty without building an entirely new internal role around it.
Emergent established an ongoing SQL Server managed services relationship centered on monitoring, optimization, and having an experienced DBA available when something needed deeper attention.
Redgate SQL Monitor gave both teams visibility into the health of the database environment, including its SQL Server availability groups. Emergent worked with the credit union to make the alerts useful rather than noisy, separating the conditions that actually warranted immediate attention from those that could simply be reviewed.
As the relationship grew, the credit union moved to 24/7 Platinum support.
That meant a database issue at night or over a weekend no longer had to wait for the next business day. Emergent's DBA team established clear alert classifications and escalation processes so the right issues could receive around-the-clock attention.
Some of the most valuable work came from looking closely at processes that were already functioning.
The credit union had regulatory requirements that called for monthly and annual backups to be retained for multiple years. As those files accumulated, Emergent identified an opportunity to improve the way transaction log files were being managed.
The team right-sized the logs and automated portions of the backup process, ultimately recovering approximately two terabytes of storage while creating a more efficient approach to long-term retention.
That is not the kind of database improvement a customer will ever see. It is exactly the kind of improvement an IT team appreciates.
Quarterly reviews give the credit union another chance to look ahead instead of waiting for something to go wrong. Emergent assesses the environment, surfaces emerging capacity or performance concerns, and recommends improvements based on what is actually happening inside the databases.
The internal team has also received training so it can confidently handle more routine responsibilities itself.
Over time, the relationship has expanded beyond a simple “call the DBA if something breaks” model. The conversations have moved from storage, permissions, and query performance toward a broader question: what else can the organization do with data now that the foundation underneath it is dependable?
That evolution says a lot about what good managed services should accomplish.
The goal is not to make a client permanently dependent on someone else to keep SQL Server running. It is to give the organization access to specialized expertise when it needs it, reduce the amount of uncertainty around the environment, and create enough confidence in the fundamentals to start thinking about what comes next.
Learn more about data platform managed services.
Financial Institution: Planning a Strategic Move to Azure
Cloud migration conversations can get ambitious pretty quickly.
Someone says Azure. Someone starts discussing architecture. Cost estimates appear. Timelines get proposed. Before long, an organization is talking about where its workloads should go without having a complete picture of how those workloads behave today.
For a financial institution evaluating its long-term cloud strategy, Emergent started somewhere less exciting but much more useful: discovery.
The company had been operating its systems inside a hosted private cloud environment. That approach had provided stability, but an upcoming contract renewal created a natural opportunity to ask whether it was still the right fit for the organization's future.
Microsoft Azure was one of the possibilities.
Before leadership could make that decision responsibly, however, the organization needed to understand what a migration would actually involve.
Which servers were running? How much capacity were they really using? Which workloads depended on one another? What would those workloads look like in Azure? What might the environment cost once it got there?
Those questions are especially important in financial services, where “we’ll figure it out during the migration” is not much of a strategy.
The institution's tightly controlled private cloud added another wrinkle. Emergent could not simply walk in and freely explore the environment. The discovery process itself had to respect the same security and access requirements that governed everything else.
Emergent deployed the Azure Migrate appliance within those constraints and allowed it to collect telemetry for four weeks.
During that period, the tool gathered information about server configurations, resource utilization, performance, and dependencies between systems. Instead of building recommendations around assumptions or generic sizing exercises, Emergent could see how the workloads actually behaved.
That data became the basis for the cloud strategy.
Emergent evaluated potential Azure configurations, migration sequencing, architecture, dependencies, and cost. The final roadmap gave the organization a clearer picture of what should move, how the pieces fit together, and what the transition could realistically require.
Just as importantly, leadership gained a financial view of the decision.
Moving to the cloud is not inherently cheaper, and “Azure” is not a meaningful budget number by itself. By grounding the analysis in real utilization data, the institution could compare its options with a much clearer understanding of the likely costs.
The discovery ultimately gave the organization enough confidence to move forward with an Azure migration.
That is probably the biggest value of this kind of engagement. Before moving anything, the organization moved from “we think Azure may make sense” to having evidence, dependencies, cost projections, and a sequence of next steps that technical and business leaders could evaluate together.
Emergent's relationship with the institution continued beyond discovery, expanding into ongoing cloud work and a Cloud Solution Provider relationship as the migration strategy moved forward.
For financial institutions facing a hosting renewal, aging infrastructure, or simply a question about whether their current environment still makes sense, the first cloud decision may not be what to migrate.
It may be whether you understand your environment well enough to make that decision yet.
Learn more about Azure migration & landing zones.
How Emergent Software Supports Finance & Insurance Organizations
These stories show just a few of the ways technology can support finance and insurance organizations. For some, the priority is a more secure cloud environment. For others, it’s modernizing a critical application, improving database reliability, planning a move to Azure, or giving internal teams better tools to manage content and operations.
Emergent Software works across that broader technology environment, helping finance and insurance organizations with custom software development, cloud, cybersecurity, data, managed services, and ongoing modernization.
The right starting point looks different for every organization. What matters is understanding where the biggest risks, inefficiencies, or limitations are today and building a practical path forward from there.
Does any of this sound familiar? Reach out to Emergent Software to talk through where technology could better support your business.
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