You Don’t Need a Rebuild—You Need a Bridge

It happens every few years. A new CIO steps in, surveys the aging retirement platform, and declares, “We need to rebuild this from the ground up.”

It sounds bold, visionary, and forward-thinking.

Until the estimates roll in—time, cost, risk, resourcing—that fresh start suddenly becomes a multi-year saga with no clear ROI, or worse, a stalled-out initiative that never crosses the finish line.

Here’s the truth:

You probably don’t need a rebuild. You need a bridge.

Rebuilds promise a clean slate. But in reality, most recordkeeping systems are tightly woven into decades of business logic, vendor integrations, compliance rules, and operational nuance. Tearing them out means re-learning hard lessons you’ve already paid for.

A bridge gives you something better: Extending the life of your core system while modernizing everything around it.

This is how we work at Convergent.

We build lightweight adapters, service layers, and automation tools that:

• Make legacy systems accessible via modern APIs

• Support new web and mobile experiences without rewriting the engine

• Enable rapid innovation on the surface while keeping the core stable

Need a better participant experience? A faster plan sponsor portal? Stronger data access for analytics?

You can build all that without waiting three years for a core rewrite.

Ready to modernize without tearing it all down? Let’s build the bridge together.