Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) congratulates the winners of its 2021 Innovation Awards: Amica Mutual Insurance Company, Encova Insurance with partner Cognizant, and Gore Mutual Insurance Company. In its fifteenth year, this year’s awards honor Guidewire customers that are adapting to an accelerating pace of industry change and evolving customer needs in innovative ways. Winners were announced during Connections, Guidewire’s annual customer conference.
The 2021 winners are:
Amica Mutual Insurance Company - leveraging Guidewire Predictive Analytics to enhance its claims review process, ensuring each claim has an appropriate handler for consistent, accurate, and efficient adjusting.
Historically, Amica reviewed every property claim thoroughly before assigning a handler, which required considerable time. That commitment increased significantly when a hurricane, wildfire, or other catastrophic event occurred and resulted in an influx of claims. Recognizing
the limitations of its manual review process for assigning claims, Amica sought a better approach.
Amica used an open-source product, Python, to develop the Claims Desktop Review model (a multistage homeowner physical damage model) from ClaimCenter data. Then, the organization worked to ensure the model would accurately predict which homeowners claims could be handled through desktop review. When a challenge arose with converting the Python model to Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), Amica and Guidewire worked together to address it, ultimately improving the Python package and benefitting the Python
open-source community. This allowed Amica to generate an endpoint for operationalizing the model in ClaimCenter.
As a result of the project, Amica can now process claims more quickly and consistently by predicting which claims are good candidates for desk review and which require a field inspection. Ensuring each claim has the right handler from the start is essential for accurate and efficient adjusting – which, in turn, helps Amica settle claims faster and foster even more trust and lasting relationships with its policyholders.
Amica is a four-time Innovation Award winner, with previous wins in 2007, 2008, and 2010.
For additional information on Amica, visit www.amica.com.
Encova Insurance - the reinvention of its personal lines operations through its Personal Lines Transformation, enabling agents to do business faster and more efficiently and policyholders to access their policy information more easily than ever before.
On July 15, 2019, Motorists and BrickStreet re-entered the market as Encova Insurance with a clear vision of who the organization was as one company: a one-stop shop to meet and exceed the insurance needs of its agents and policyholders. And part of that one-stop-shop approach included a competitive new personal lines experience.
Encova Insurance’s Personal Lines Transformation focused on reinventing its personal lines operations from the ground up. The organization implemented new business processes from point-of-sale through the policy lifecycle, brought market-leading products to its approximately 6,000 independent agents who write Encova personal lines business, and introduced an improved, digital-first customer experience for agents and policyholders.
As a result of the initiative, Encova Insurance has experienced the following results:
Through first quarter 2021, year-over-year new policy counts increased 32%, and in Q2 and Q3, they were up 168% and 228% respectively.
Adoption of straight-through processing increased from 0% before the program’s launch to 40% a few months later.
Year-to-date through first quarter 2021, Encova’s retention rate increased 0.3 points, as the company was able to rewrite business to its new personal lines offering that would have otherwise been lost from its legacy program.
New business sales increased in states where Encova launched its brand-new personal lines solution, with onboarded agents writing $2.9 million in direct written premium in the first seven months.
32% of auto policyholders and 38% of homeowners policyholders are using the company’s new paperless eDelivery feature, and 56% of auto and 59% of homeowners policyholders are taking advantage of the new AutoPay offering.
The company previously won an Innovation Award for their commercial lines transformation as Motorists Insurance Group in 2018.
For additional information about Encova, visit www.encova.com.
Gore Mutual Insurance Company - improving broker, customer, and employee experiences with InsuranceSuite in Guidewire Cloud.
As the first Canadian insurer to use Guidewire Cloud to deploy the full InsuranceSuite, Gore Mutual Insurance Company (Gore Mutual) sought to improve its broker/agent experience and provide a streamlined process flow. With an enhanced system, brokers could focus less on the mechanics of using the organization’s system and more on finding the right set of protections for the customer – letting them focus on building a strong relationship with the policyholder. In addition, Gore Mutual aimed to provide brokers an authentication model that
focuses on ease-of-use, while still employing high levels of security.
Benefits Gore Mutual is receiving include:
Enhanced and secure broker connectivity – Seamless broker management system (BMS) integration to support fully digitized broker workflows (upload, inquiry, download, and electronic documents);
Fully digitized sales journey – Fast and consistent broker real-time quoting (sub-second response times for >95% transactions) and straight-through processing (<four minutes end-to-end);
Digitized servicing journey – Direct Guidewire access to allow servicing in real-time (policy, billing and claims) via Guidewire digital technology; and
Performance enhancements – Real-time and on-demand data and analytics enabled via centralized enterprise data-warehouse (on Cloud) providing a 360-degree policy lifecycle view and business performance reporting, both delivering enhanced/personalized broker/customer experiences and business related insights for optimization enablement.
For additional information on Gore Mutual Insurance, visit www.goremutual.ca.
“We congratulate this year’s Guidewire Innovation Award winners,” said Brian Desmond, chief marketing officer, Guidewire Software. “We were impressed with the high quality of the entries. Our customers continually inspire us with the innovative ways in which they leverage Guidewire to better serve their policyholders and agents, enhance operational efficiencies, and meet their IT and business objectives.”
About Guidewire Software
Guidewire is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. We combine digital, core, analytics, and AI to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 450 insurers, from new ventures to the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.
As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record, with 1,000+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our marketplace provides hundreds of applications that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation.
For more information, please visit www.guidewire.com and follow us on Twitter: @Guidewire_PandC.