Meet Texas Mutual

Business Benefits

• Scale resources to consume extra influx of claims coming after a catastrophe during the go-live weekend
• Launch a first-of-its-kind UBI product
• Update seamlessly with no additional cost and no impact on the business
• Deployment of new capabilities is faster and downtime is reduced
• Improve broker quote response time, leading to an increase in broker quotes

The Story

Created in 1991, Texas Mutual had a vision to build a stronger, safer Texas. With its mission to protect businesses and promote safe environments, more than 75,000 companies trust Texas Mutual with their workers’ compensation policies.

Texas Mutual formulated a cloud-first business strategy but did not have a timeline set. In 2020, the insurer faced an upgrade as it was on version 8 of BillingCenter and PolicyCenter. It had already upgraded ClaimCenter to version 9. The question they had to answer was whether they should go through another upgrade or fast-forward their cloud strategy.

Even while knowing they would face challenges being an early adopter as a migration customer, Texas Mutual decided to move to Guidewire Cloud and went live in February 2023.

Texas Mutual’s Chief Information Officer Jeannette Sprague said, “We were willing to accept those challenges to get to the cloud and take advantage of capabilities that would open up to us.” She added, “This opportunity aligned with our multi-year modernization strategy. We knew we would get there; it was only a question of when.”

Shifting the Update Burden

Part of the decision to make the move at this time was based on the fact that Texas Mutual wanted to avoid experiencing the burden of upgrading again, as the previous ClaimCenter upgrade took one year. 

Sprague said, “That upgrade basically sidelined our team’s ability to do anything for a full year, and realizing that the burden of upgrading would shift to Guidewire made the difference.”

The Guidewire update process proved beneficial to Texas Mutual. According to Senior Program Manager Alan Cullen, “Our first update was to Garmisch, and it took only 13 weeks.” He added, “That was considerably better than a year, and we expect our next update to Jasper to take four to eight weeks.”

Impressive Time-Savings

Beyond the improvement in the time it took Texas Mutual to update, the insurer has experienced so many other benefits since going to the cloud. The display loss ratio dropped from nine minutes to 36 seconds. The loading pricing tool used to take one hour and now only takes one minute. The time to make a policy change dropped from two hours to 45 minutes.

Cullen said, “Moving to Guidewire Cloud led to a 66% improvement in overall performance.” He added, “Tasks within the system are taking about a third of the time as they did before.”

Texas Mutual is even seeing time savings with Guidewire’s partners. According to Cullen, “The monthly check-in port from Mitchell used to take about 10 hours, and now it's only three minutes.”

Taking Advantage of Guidewire’s Ecosystem

The improvement in time with Mitchell is exactly what Sprague was referring to when she said, “Guidewire Cloud is also enabling us to integrate the best-in-class insurtech solutions that are part of Guidewire Marketplace and the PartnerConnect ecosystem into our workflows to help us deliver value to our customers much more quickly.”