Mountain West Farm Bureau

Business Benefits

• Redesigned five personal lines of business in eight weeks 

• Developed five personal lines of business on the cloud in 120 days 

• Experienced updates in a matter of days versus months 

• Trimmed time to complete policy changes to minutes instead of days 

The Story

Mountain West Farm Bureau was initially founded by the Wyoming Farm Bureau in 1948 and joined by the Montana Farm Bureau in 1958. Currently, the company offers multi-line insurance products to individuals, families, and small businesses throughout Wyoming and Montana, and in Colorado through a wholly owned company – 360 Insurance.

In June 2021, Mountain West turned to Guidewire to replace its legacy systems. The company subscribed to InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud. Soon after making that decision, the insurer realized that speed would be a big part of its story.

“The cloud product — especially the power of the cloud infrastructure in terms of speed and capabilities — is a force-multiplier,” says Tim Hays, Vice President and Chief Information Officer. He adds, “The ability to spin up environments at speeds that weren’t possible prior to this is, quite frankly, a game changer for everyone.”

It only took Mountain West 120 days to go live with five personal lines of business in one state.

Mountain West also praises Guidewire’s Advanced Product Designer (APD) for how quickly they were able to redesign those lines of business. With APD, it took only eight weeks to redesign the entire book of business for personal lines, which included auto, property, umbrella, inland marine, and personal and farm liability.

Mountain West has also taken advantage of Guidewire Analytics and Digital products.

The insurer has been a longtime Predict customer. In the first four years after adopting Predict for loss ratio modeling in the personal auto line, Mountain West saw approximately a 20% growth in written premium. Crediting Predict, the insurer is now writing more profitable business because of the adjustments made to premiums as a direct result of the modeling.

Mountain West is also using Explore for BillingCenter.

“Building an Explore dashboard is one of the easiest things I've done,” says Daniel Sorensen, Actuarial Analyst. “Prior to Explore, the process for us to get actionable insights out of our data would have taken a month to figure out.”

Mountain West is using Data Studio in tandem with Explore. This enables the insurer to feed data into Data Studio where it can be used to build operational dashboards through Explore.

With ProducerEngage, Mountain West has been able to give their agents direct access to quote business, make changes to existing policies in near real-time, and submit policies and applications. This has dropped the times to make policy changes from days to just minutes.

About Mountain West Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company

Headquarters: Laramie, Wyoming
Operations: United States
Business Lines: Commercial and Personal