Residents recently gained the ability to upload a copy of their vehicle’s proof-of-insurance document to the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) from a mobile device.
“We were evaluating where a lot of our customers get turned away because they don’t have proof of their liability insurance when they come to offices,” Liz Coalts, DMV deputy commissioner for modernization, said.
In this case, the DMV can send the driver a text message which opens a prompt, letting them easily file their liability insurance document. Since the DMV began offering the feature this spring, 11,000 transactions have occurred where drivers were able to electronically file a proof-of-insurance document, Coalts said.
“We’ve been doing a lot of, I’ll call them ‘little things,’ that are not really, but they’re not as flashy,” she said, noting another recent improvement — posting wait times for each DMV office on the agency’s main website.
“We’re trying to bring the DMV up to being an exceptional customer service organization,” Coalts said of the wide-reaching three-year project to transform the DMV with new technology, work processes and tools like mobile driver’s licenses. “It’s meeting customers where they are for how they need to interact with the DMV.”
That includes shorter wait times, more opportunities for online transactions, and text messaging to let DMV visitors know when it’s their turn in the queue.
The modernization project, a partnership with Kyndryl, began in late March, and will unfold in two phases focusing on the drivers first, and vehicles second. The company has a six-year contract with the state, with the first three years focused on system implementation, followed by three years of maintenance and support.
The DMV is aiming for the drivers-side upgrades to go live in 18 months, rather than the two-year timeline proposed and, said Coalts, “we’re investigating how we can bring mobile driver’s licenses implemented sooner.”
All of this will require sizable changes to the agency’s enterprise technology, a legacy mainframe dating to the 1990s, which includes a collection of separate systems to perform different tasks like issuing driver’s licenses or handling titles and registration.
The current system is dependent on COBOL, the JFK-era programing language still in use but largely familiar to a waning cadre of workers.
“Trying to make any changes to those systems is extremely difficult,” Coalts said. “We’re just constantly trying to bolt things together. So we definitely need to move to a modern, cloud-based, dot-net infrastructure.”
Which is where Kyndryl comes in. The company, which has worked on DMV updates in Virginia and Arizona, takes a systemwide approach to modernization, beyond just an upgrade of technology, to a strategy that wholly integrates the modern tech into a new organizational system.
“A thing that gets a lot of the attention is usually the biggest sort of elephant in the room. It‘s the big iron. It‘s the old big mainframe that was built in the ‘80s or ‘90s that needs to get upgraded,” Brian Shell, Kyndryl vice president and senior partner, DMV solutions, said.
Often, the issues facing DMVs reach well beyond outdated computers. In North Carolina, the population has surged about 39 percent from 2000, growing by more than 3.1 million residents to 11.2 million in 2025, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in Missouri. All of these residents, officials said, are using a DMV system that has not added workforce, office space or technology in proportion to that growth.
“And then on top of that, citizen and resident expectations, customer expectations have changed dramatically over the last 26 years in what we expect in a consumer-like experience anywhere,” Shell said. “These systems were actually built in an era when the idea of digital engagement and digital first wasn’t even a concept. It was science fiction. But now it’s the norm. And so DMVs in particular are both looking to try to bring their systems into that new norm.”
One outcome of the new system will be to get new DMV workers — known as “examiners” — fully trained within six weeks, with many able to reach minimum competency in days.
Reducing wait times will mean picking apart workflows and processes to learn where time can be saved, looking at appointment scheduling and queuing, reducing time between transactions, and flexing capacity between an office with no wait times to another with a line out the door.
A feature of the new system will be the MAX platform, developed by Kyndryl and the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division, which will enable office-to-office flexible working, allowing the DMV to more readily manage the workload.
The project will also modernize a key role of DMVs: credentialing digital identity documents. It will include the release of a mobile wallet, where driver credentials and vehicle registrations can live. The system will be able to send alerts when these documents need to be renewed, which will be possible digitally, within the app.
“Having the modernized system will absolutely make it easier for us to start offering things like mobile driver’s licenses, like potentially doing e-titling down the road where you can do title transactions completely online, things like that,” Coalts said. “Because it is a system that other systems can talk to easier.”
DMVs are generally seen as the front door to state government, given the wide cross-section of population interacting with the agencies. And it’s because of this close relationship to the public that exchanges need to be positive ones, officials said.
“It is oftentimes their [the public’s] first experience with state government,” Coalts said. “And yes, it completely makes an impression.”
On government interactions, the DMV, she added, “sets the tone for the rest of the state.”
