North Carolina’s Division of Motor Vehicles has selected Kyndryl for an $84.8 million modernization contract that will move five COBOL-based systems dating to the early 1990s onto NCMAX, a unified cloud-native platform hosted on Microsoft Azure.
NCDMV said the award covers implementation, training and data migration, and that a $5 million Microsoft credit lowers the state’s net cost to $79.8 million.
Commissioner Paul Tine said North Carolinians deserve a “modern, efficient DMV” and called the deal the “best deal for taxpayers.
NCDMV said the Azure-hosted platform will integrate driver services, vehicle services, motor carrier and International Registration Plan functions, insurance verification, compliance and financial operations into a single system.
The platform is meant to support real-time processing, stronger reporting, faster system changes and broader online and mobile service delivery.
NCDMV said the procurement was structured around outcomes rather than rigid technical specifications, and that 14 vendors submitted proposals.
The outcomes include a unified customer record, lower wait times, faster driver transactions, broader online service availability, embedded translation services, a mobile driver license app and six-week staff onboarding.
NCMAX builds on the MAX platform first developed for Arizona, later implemented in Wyoming and now being deployed in Virginia. It said states using MAX own the software, host it independently, collaborate on development and share code improvements.
What the state auditor found
That award comes after North Carolina’s state auditor said DMV modernization had yet to produce “meaningful customer service improvements.”
In an August 2025 audit, the Office of the State Auditor said DMV and the Department of Information Technology-Transportation had launched 46 projects since 2014 at a cost of about $42 million, but outside experts still found the agency’s mainframe systems outdated and overdue for replacement.
The scale of what’s being replaced
The scale of the environment helps explain why the replacement effort has carried so much weight. The same audit said NCDMV serves about 8.6 million customers through driver license and ID services alone.
It also said DMV relies on seven legacy mainframe systems overall, and that about 50 federal, state and local applications connect to DMV systems and depend on accurate, timely DMV data. That helps explain why the state is shifting to a single Azure-hosted platform rather than continuing to patch separate legacy environments.
NCDMV’s own planning documents describe the operational strain around that legacy stack in similar terms. Its strategic plan said the agency entered 2025 facing long wait times, outdated technology, inefficient processes and frustration for both customers and employees.
Its examiner staffing plan said average statewide wait times exceeded one hour and 50 minutes, and that nearly half of customers were traveling outside their closest office for service.
Incomplete prerequisites and parallel progress
The audit also said several modernization prerequisites were still incomplete as of April 22, 2025, including a comprehensive project plan, prioritized infrastructure improvements, data-cleansing work and a personnel management plan.
The contract lands as NCDMV is already pushing routine work out of offices. On April 2, the agency moved another provisional-license upgrade online and said the change would reduce office visits and free examiner capacity.
In February, it said its self-service kiosk pilot had already processed nearly 90,000 transactions. NCDMV has said driver services are expected to transition first, with vehicle services following late.