John Hancock’s retirement planning team, a leader in enterprise group retirement services, was hindered by manual onboarding processes—faxing, transcription, alerts—and slow portfolio creation. To remain competitive, they needed to evolve from traditional methods into modern, digital-first workflows. TribalScale partnered with them to embed Agile transformation directly into their delivery model—modernizing both the technology stack and team mindset.
Impact Delivered
Challenge
John Hancock’s retirement services team managed billions in assets, but their core onboarding process was anchored in outdated, manual workflows. Every new portfolio—particularly stable value accounts, which made up the vast majority—required faxed forms, transcription, and hand-entered alerts.
This created three critical issues:
Delays and inefficiency: Portfolio creation could take up to 10 minutes per account, adding friction to both advisors and clients.
Error risk: Manual steps increased the chance of mistakes, undermining trust and compliance.
Competitive pressure: With other financial institutions modernizing, slow and fragile processes threatened John Hancock’s reputation as a market leader.
The company needed more than incremental fixes. They required a modern architecture and cultural shift—to not only streamline workflows, but also to empower their teams with Agile practices that could sustain innovation long term.
Solution
Working onsite with retirement services, TribalScale brought a hands-on, learning-driven partnership:
We began by closely aligning with internal stakeholders and users to understand end-to-end needs. A joint technical discovery followed—mapping how new systems should interoperate with legacy infrastructure. Through embedded Agile coaching and pairing engineering talent, we fostered ownership and expanded capability within the team.
The focus: build a modern, streamlined workflow architecture for portfolio creation.
We delivered a microservices-based solution layered over Pivotal Cloud Foundry, leveraging:
.NET Core APIs to manage business logic;
React for responsive front-end interaction;
Kafka, a messaging queue, to synchronize new portfolio data with legacy systems;
SQL Server and MongoDB for structured and flexible data storage;
Concourse CI to automate testing and delivery pipelines.
This wasn’t just a technology boost—it allowed the team to genuinely practice XP techniques, understand modern tooling, and refresh development culture.
Research & Transformation Framework
Embedded Agile coaching & pairing: Onsite collaboration enabled rapid capability growth.
Technical discovery workshops: Ensured seamless integration with legacy platforms.
Domain-driven development: Designing the solution for the portfolio process context, not abstraction.
Tools and Technologies Used:
Microsoft .NET
React
Concourse
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Mongo DB
Microsoft SQL Server
Kafka
Outcome
What began as a project to streamline onboarding became a blueprint for cultural and technical evolution. John Hancock’s retirement services team shifted from project execution to Agile leadership—championing modern development practices, delivering faster value, and empowering their peers to adopt digital transformation strategies at scale.
Why It Matters
Legacy transformation isn’t just code—it’s context, capability, and culture. This case demonstrates how targeting a high-impact domain (portfolio onboarding) with modern architecture and Agile coaching can ignite organization-wide change. John Hancock didn’t just modernize—it rewrote how their teams work and deliver.