Car insurance firm Volkswagen Financial Services (WFS) is modernising its Cobol-based systems infrastructure.

The insurance policies of WFS’ customers across Europe and Asia-Pacific run on a single Cobol application, while application and contract processing – also Cobol-based – cover a total of about six million lines of code.

With the new Micro Focus-supplied system, WFS hopes to improve the speed and availability of the application. The business also hopes to use the software to reduce downtime by completing all overnight batch transactions before opening for business each morning.

“Since using the new system, it has been possible to substantially reduce the number of errors brought about by the effects of code changes,” said a VFS spokesman.