Kodebaze finishes nine-month overhaul of Norwegian leasing platform

By AI, Created 11:01 AM UTC, May 20, 2026, /AGP/ – Kodebaze said it completed a nine-month modernization for a Norwegian vehicle leasing company, replacing a 1998 Microsoft Access and VBA system with a modern Azure microservice stack. The cutover finished with zero production downtime and removed a 28-year-old legacy dependency from core leasing operations.

Why it matters: - The project shows a way to modernize deeply embedded financial systems without stopping live operations. - The legacy platform had handled continuous financial transactions since 1998, so a failed cutover could have disrupted leasing, invoicing, and contract workflows. - The migration also removed dependence on older on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Access/VBA technology.

What happened: - Kodebaze completed a nine-month modernization engagement for a Norwegian vehicle leasing company owned by a major European financial group. - The company replaced a Microsoft Access database and VBA forms system built in 1998. - The legacy estate contained 750,000 lines of code across 175 database tables. - The new platform runs on React, .NET, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft Azure. - The cutover finished with zero production downtime.

The details: - The legacy system had been processing live financial transactions continuously since 1998. - The client’s parent company first proposed a wholesale lift-and-shift cloud migration. - Kodebaze instead used incremental module extraction with continuous data synchronization back to the legacy system. - That approach kept the business operational during the transformation. - Kodebaze engineers first cleaned the 750,000-line VBA codebase by removing framework artifacts, dead code, and library noise. - The remaining code was split into semantic categories and processed by dedicated AI agents. - Kodebaze said that approach addressed a known weakness in large language models on long legacy codebases, where attention can degrade across long sequences. - The modernization covered customer management, contract and quoting workflows, vehicle fleet inventory, invoicing, and integrations for vehicle data, insurance, and contract signing. - The new platform includes full CI/CD pipelines and automated monitoring.

Between the lines: - Claus Villumsen, Kodebaze’s CTO and founder, said wholesale replacement of a system this complex would have failed. - Villumsen said incremental extraction worked because the team chose the right method and moved one piece at a time. - Kodebaze said it learned not to change business logic and code structure at the same time. - The company now separates behavior preservation and structural refactoring into distinct phases on all engagements. - Kodebaze framed the project as an example of governed, auditable, reversible modernization rather than a one-time rewrite.

What’s next: - Kodebaze said it will continue using the same phased approach on future modernization work. - Villumsen’s first-person account of the project is available here. - Kodebaze also directs readers to its website for more information.