“We’ve successfully built a highly performant and adaptable product delivery factory. We have reached a point where the delivery engine is running so fast that we are now challenging the business to ideate and provide requirements quickly enough to keep the funnel full.”
Dan Wuest, SVP - Products, Engineering & Architecture
CNA
CNA, a top 10 U.S. commercial insurance company, provides a broad range of standard and specialized property and casualty products to businesses across the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Europe. The company differentiates itself through deep industry specialization and a commitment to being a top-quartile underwriting organization.
CNA's relationship with Guidewire spans over two decades, making the carrier one of Guidewire's earliest legacy customers. CNA first went live on ClaimCenter 1.0 in 2004. While an ambitious multi-year transformation to move underwriting to an on-premises Guidewire platform stalled in the mid-2010s due to its scale and complexity, leadership used a 2020 technology inflection point to re-evaluate their strategy. In 2021, CNA made a decisive pivot away from on-premises upgrades to adopt Guidewire Cloud, becoming the first tier 1 insurer to migrate a 5-terabyte production database.
For CNA, the journey to the cloud was an essential response to a market where the "speed of business is moving ever faster," said Colleen Thomas, VP of Business Relationship Management and Innovation. "In a world where everyone has a cell phone and expects instant results on a personal level, our business needs to strive to keep up with those same expectations. Our agents and brokers have been incredibly pleased with our ability to turn around pricing and quotes faster; what used to take 90 minutes now takes us four minutes or less."
This shift required a fundamental change in how CNA viewed transformation. Jane Possell, EVP and CIO, recalls the pivot away from "big-bang" projects: “It’s tempting to wait for that ‘key moment.’ And you can wait. Or, you can figure out how to group these changes into meaningful bites that get something done while giving your business strategic optionality in those investments. That’s the biggest differentiator in how CNA is transforming – it’s an evolution,” Possell said. “By adopting an incremental approach and moving to Guidewire Cloud, we’ve reached a point where I can tell the business we can have a product ready in two weeks. It’s absolutely mind-boggling—it’s so rare in a career that you get to tell the business that technology is ready and waiting for them."
Central to this agility is Guidewire Cloud and the offerings that come with it, including Jutro Digital Platform, Integration Gateway, and Advanced Product Designer (APD). "With Jutro, we aren't just building back-end systems; we are delivering digital portals for specific personas, like our workers' comp agents, in a fraction of the time,” said Sreenivas Gouraram, VP of Guidewire Platforms at CNA. “By moving our legacy products into APD and using Jutro, we’ve achieved a 30-40% improvement in system performance. We launched nine products in a single year—a massive jump from the one or two we could manage previously. And, because the system is so stable, with 99.8% uptime, we are no longer spending our time on outages; we are focused on innovation."
Taking a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, CNA used APD to gather product requirements, rationalization, and visualization of complex package products. “APD has really been a cornerstone to the predictability of our product rollouts,” Possell said. “It’s enabled us to have more consistent implementation in terms of how long they take and the cost to do them.”
CNA brought this same speed and predictability to its Surety business unit. CNA chose the Guidewire Cloud Platform to deliver core business value for Surety, aiming to improve operational efficiency and expand market access. In what stands as possibly the fastest Surety go-live executed to date, wrapping up the project in just four months. By implementing PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter, Client Data Management, and Cloud Data Access on Guidewire Cloud, CNA unlocked instant quote processing, bond execution, and account servicing while minimizing manual paperwork.
CNA didn't go it alone across its overall cloud transformation. They leaned heavily on the Guidewire Marketplace and strategic partners like PwC to provide the scale and skill-set required for such a large migration. Integrations from partners like Smart Communications enabled daily or weekly document updates, a process that used to take months. Dan Wuest, SVP, Products, Engineering & Architecture, views this ecosystem as a competitive multiplier: "Our relationship with Guidewire is a true win-win partnership. By leveraging the Guidewire ecosystem, we’ve streamlined more than 100 integration points and reduced our update cycles from 18 months to just two weeks. We aren't just staying current; we are actively using this platform to get further ahead of the competition."
Today, as a Guidewire Innovation Award winner, CNA stands as a blueprint for excellence. "We’ve successfully built a highly performant and adaptable product delivery factory,” Wuest said. “We have reached a point where the delivery engine is running so fast that we are now challenging the business to ideate and provide requirements quickly enough to keep the funnel full."
