Guidewire®

Platform Features

The Guidewire platform provides a set of core technology components that provide critical building blocks and services to all Guidewire applications.

• Rules engine: Insurance companies need the flexibility to continually refine their core business logic in response to changing business needs. Guidewire's rules engine gives each customer tight control over the critical steps in their underwriting, claims, and billing processes - such as risk qualification, segmentation, assignment, and validation. The rule engine combines easy-to-understand, hierarchical rule execution with a rich library of methods specifically developed to meet the needs of modern insurance companies.
• Business process management: Managing and tracking end-to-end business processes is increasingly important to leading insurance carriers. The Guidewire platform gives insurers the ability to define long-running insurance processes involving multiple activities and actors, with exceptions and escalations as appropriate. In addition, notifications and requests can be sent across multiple Guidewire applications, enabling a new level of collaboration between different departments such as underwriting and claims.
• Configuration: Every insurer needs to tailor its core systems to its unique business needs. The Guidewire platform allows customers to extend the application data model and screens using logical, easily-understandable XML files. The use of metadata enables automatic modification of the database - without custom SQL commands - and ensures that configuration changes made to one version of an application can be easily preserved across upgrades.
• Integration: Core insurance applications must integrate seamlessly with many different applications built in a wide range of technologies over the past three decades. Guidewire provides a variety of integration mechanisms, including a web services API, event-based messaging, and the ability to add integration adapters at any point in the application; data can be exchanged in any format, including ACORD XML or IAA. These flexible options have enabled over one hundred live production integrations at our current customer sites, including integrations to dozens of legacy mainframe systems.
• Security: The Guidewire platform provides mechanisms for controlling who has access to an application, what functionality he or she can use, and what data (accounts, policies, claims, etc.) he or she can view or edit. All application functionality is controlled by specific permissions, which can be assigned to roles as customers desire. Each user's access to data can be restricted based on his or her relationship to that data, making it possible to restrict sensitive data as tightly as is needed.
• ContactCenter: Insurance companies need to manage contacts across multiple disparate applications. Guidewire ContactCenter shares contacts across all Guidewire applications, enabling insurers to track policyholders, agents, vendors, claimants, and other parties in one central repository. ContactCenter's flexible architecture allows multiple linked versions of contacts, duplicate contact alerts, and configurable criteria for enforcing contact uniqueness.