She published the timeline that showed her own programme was a year late

Core system replacements at insurers run late. This is so consistently true that the interesting question is not whether a programme slips but what the organisation is told while it is slipping.

Aisha Rahman took over core platforms at Sentinel General Insurance in 2019 and became chief information officer in 2022. The policy administration replacement she inherited was scoped at three years. It is now in its fourth, running in parallel across two motor product lines.

In early 2026 she published an internal timeline showing exactly where the twelve months went. The majority is attributed to data migration from a system built in the 1990s — three decades of exceptions, workarounds and undocumented business rules that the new platform had no equivalent for.

We scoped the new system carefully and the old one casually, and the old one is where thirty years of exceptions live.

Why publish it

Rahman’s argument is that an undocumented delay gets re-litigated at every steering committee, consuming senior time in a recurring negotiation about whose fault it is. A documented delay is argued about once.

The publication also had a defensive function. Programmes of this length outlive the executives who commission them, and the institutional story of why something is late tends to be written by whoever is in the room when it finally lands.

The structural point

Her broader claim is that Indian general insurers underfund claims technology relative to distribution technology, and do so rationally. Distribution improvements appear in a quarter. Claims improvements appear in a loss ratio three years out, by which time the budget conversation has happened twelve times.