The article implies it wasn't a very nice or well-structured codebase, so I guess they didn't make it much worse. And they ripped out the COBOL Data management

The article implies it wasn't a very nice or well-structured codebase, so I guess they didn't make it much worse. And they ripped out the COBOL Data management system and replaced it with a RDBMS. This alone probably is worth it since you can hook it up to business intelligence tools now to create reports and dashboards.