When budgeting conversations around technology investments stop at the price tag (implementation fees, renewals, support contracts), they miss where most of the cost actually lives. A better metric is a system’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This includes: The costs of on-premise hardware and maintenance. The time your staff spends working around limitations in current legacy systems. The effort required to reconcile data across platforms. The risk introduced by manual processes. The strain those inefficiencies place on member service. These costs don’t appear as a single line item alongside system expenses, but they accumulate steadily over time. Applying a TCO lens to technology decisions shifts the conversation from short-term cost comparison to long-term operational sustainability. Over time, that accumulation shows up as operational pressure: Teams work harder just to maintain service levels. Simple requests take longer than they should. Reporting requires manual intervention. Knowledge becomes concentrated in a few long-tenured employees who know how to navigate system gaps. For public entity pools operating with lean teams, finite budgets, and heightened obligations for transparency and stewardship, these pressures directly affect the experience your member organizations have when they need timely answers and clear guidance. 5 Common Hidden Costs Embedded in Your Pool’s Legacy Systems Unlike commercial organizations, pools cannot simply absorb operational drag or pass rising costs downstream. Every inefficiency compounds and quietly erodes the service model that defines the pool’s value. Here are five of the most common ways legacy systems increase TCO within public entity pools over time. 1. Duplicative Work When systems aren’t integrated, people become the integration layer. Staff spend time entering the same information into multiple tools and reconciling differences between them. Policy details are verified manually. Exposure values are checked and rechecked across systems. This duplication consumes staff time, increases the risk of error, and makes daily operations dependent on individuals who know how to navigate system gaps rather than on consistent, repeatable workflows. 2. Data Ambiguity Legacy environments rarely produce one consistent view of claims, exposures, and financials. Reports pulled from different systems often don’t align, forcing leaders to pause decisions while numbers are validated. This inevitably erodes confidence with boards and members, especially during renewals, claims escalation, or rate discussions. 3. Manual Compliance Preparation Many legacy systems require teams to assemble documentation by hand. Data must be pulled from multiple sources, then reformatted and revalidated for each request. Instead of compliance being a routine outcome of daily operations, it becomes a recurring project that absorbs more time from experienced staff. As reporting, audit, and governance requirements increase, this manual effort compounds, stretching already lean teams and increasing the risk of error. 4. Increased Cyber Risk Exposure Fragmented and aging systems increase cyber risk exposure through outdated infrastructure, inconsistent access controls, and lightly governed third-party tools. These gaps often sit outside core platforms, making them harder to monitor and secure. When an incident occurs, the impact extends beyond remediation costs. It can cause operational disruption, legal exposure, and loss of trust across member organizations. 5. Member Frustration Members can feel when internal processes are slow or manual. Loss runs take longer to produce. Information must be requested repeatedly. Updates arrive inconsistently, often during high-stress claims situations. This friction creates frustration, which can weaken long-term member satisfaction and retention. What begins as a system issue ultimately becomes a relationship issue, further increasing total cost of ownership while undermining the member experience. Using TCO to Guide Modernization A TCO-based approach reframes modernization around long-term operational needs, emphasizing what it takes to operate, support, and rely on a system year after year as demands on your pool increase. For many pools, this perspective reveals a simple truth: the cost of maintaining fragmented, manual systems is often higher, and far less predictable, than investing in a modern, unified platform designed to support today’s operational, regulatory, and member-service realities. To explore how to apply a TCO framework to your own environment, and to understand what modernization can look like for public entity pools, download our recent guide on modernization for pools, “Member-First Modernization: Designing a Modern Pool Around Experience.”