Product Sustainability
Products Enabling Sustainability
Guidewire offers a unique product suite to P&C insurers worldwide, who individually and collectively as an industry are facing significant climate-related impacts. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes in 2024 reached $137 billion, exceeding $100 billion for a fifth consecutive year.1 We aim to harness the power of our cloud platform, core applications, and data and analytics services, as well as our customer relationships and overall knowledge of the industry, to contribute to our customers’ and the industry’s sustainability objectives, as well as the broader societal need to leverage new technologies and solutions to mitigate worst-case scenarios. Further, we believe a resilient P&C insurance industry is, and will continue to be, critical in protecting individuals, businesses, governments, and communities from increasing losses related to catastrophes.
Our Strategy
Our 2023 materiality assessment confirmed that product sustainability is an important topic. Through the materiality assessment, we determined that product sustainability—including products that enable sustainability—cuts across the governance, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability. It also encompasses the topics of climate resilience, emissions and energy, greater access to insurance, and security and data privacy.
| Products Enabling Sustainability | |||
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Climate Resilience Mitigating customers' climate-related risks and supporting customers responses to natural disasters and catastrophes. Also, pricing and assessing climate-related risks into our product offerings to prevent losses and mitigate climate risks, including wind, wildfire, and water. |
Emissions and Energy Contributing to clients' sustainability objectives, net-zero journeys, and waste reduction initiatives through digital products, services, and paperless enablement. |
Greater Access to Insurance Developing products and tools, both at Guidewire and through our partnerships with other firms, that help close the protection gap and support greater access to P&C insurance. |
Security and Data Privacy Protecting systems and networks from theft, damage, and disruption, and ensuring security particularly as it relates to managing client and employee data and privacy. |
Products Enabling Climate Resilience, Emissions Reductions, and Greater Access to Insurance
We are encouraged about the ways in which we can contribute to the global solutions that we believe are needed over the next decade to mitigate worst-case catastrophe scenarios. In addition to delivering on our climate goals, we are helping our clients deliver on their sustainability goals and predict and price weather-related risks by:
Innovative solutions development: We are exploring product solutions that reduce emissions or promote resilience that the P&C insurance market, and specifically some of our customers, are requesting:
- Claims solution: Through an application programming interface, the solution will assess carbon emissions associated with auto claims, prioritizing repairing over replacing parts in addition to looking at the emissions of repair shops.
- Underwriting solution: Through an application programming interface, underwriters can assess commercial insurance risks for sustainability and climate resilience risks directly in PolicyCenter.
In addition to evolving existing products and incubating new products with a climate focus, we are strategically investing in and supporting insurtechs with a climate risk or resilience value proposition through our Insurtech Vanguards program and Guidewire Ventures. Both programs promote innovation and deliver value to customers by integrating promising insurtechs into Guidewire’s Marketplace.
- Insurtech Vanguards identifies innovative companies of interest to the P&C insurance industry. Graduated insurtechs with a climate resilience focus include ICEYE and zesty.ai. Current insurtechs with a climate risk focus include True Flood Risk, Firebreak Risk, Salient Predictions, KorrAI, EcoRepair Score, EcoClaim, Faura, Manifest Climate, and Raincoat. These nine insurtechs represent 18% of the current cohort, a slight increase over the prior reporting period.
- Guidewire Ventures supports companies across the insurance ecosystem that offer innovative solutions to our customer base. Investment criteria includes companies with an insurance focus and an interest in joining Guidewire marketplace. Previous investments that have a product or products with a resilience or climate focus include insurtechs like Betterview and Flyreel. HOVER is a current portfolio company that has a product with a resilience focus.
Reducing emissions, energy, water, and waste associated with our IT infrastructure: We offer our customers Guidewire cloud solutions that leverage AWS, which according to publicly available information regarding AWS’s operations, have a lower carbon footprint than on-premises data centers2. AWS reports that it has lowered its carbon footprint by designing its data center infrastructure to increase efficiency, including optimizing air-cooling solutions; transitioning to carbon-free energy sources; using purpose-built silicon for AI workloads; employing more sustainable construction practices; improving water efficiency; and applying efficient data storage and replication strategies.3
Recently, we have continued to work with AWS to assess the environmental footprint — emissions, energy, and water — of our use of cloud services. Based on data made available to us through AWS’ Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, consolidated estimated GHG emissions associated with Guidewire’s and its customers’ use of AWS dropped by 58.2% from fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2024. We also continued to offer our customers core operational solutions that support digital and paperless engagement, which reduces paper waste through the end-to-end policy lifecycle.
Climate resilience: Assessing and mitigating clients’ exposure to climate-related risks, supporting clients’ responses to natural disasters, and properly pricing those risks through predictive analytics is core to our product sustainability strategy. Guidewire’s Hail Risk Insight (powered by HazardHub hail risk data, which reflects both regional hazard and property-level vulnerability) on the Betterview Property Intelligence and Risk Management Platform, allows customers to predict and prevent losses, correctly price premiums, and build a better customer experience. Similarly, using HazardHub’s predictive Wildfire Score methodology, the Insurance Information Institute demonstrated in its 2025 case study addressing wildfire insurance access in underserved areas of California, how geospatial data analysis can identify lower-risk properties, even in areas traditionally considered high-risk, allowing for optimized coverage. ClaimCenter and related products also enable insurers to provide a comprehensive, proactive, and timely disaster response.
Greater access to insurance: We are contributing to solutions that address the protection gap (which refers to the inability of some individuals and businesses to obtain optimal insurance coverage) through rapid product innovation, pricing accuracy, personalized coverage for changing mobility needs, expanded insurance distribution, innovative capacity-neutral products, and coverage against mounting cyber and fraud losses. Additionally, as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Center for Nature and Climate’s Extreme Heat Working Group, we contributed to a recent white paper on the topic of insuring against extreme heat and the protection gap.
Contributing to public discourse on products enabling sustainability: We are beginning to work with customers, business partners, and industry associations, among others, to enable and act on climate resiliency efforts through the deployment of our solutions and contributions to thought leadership. To date, some of this work includes supporting reforms to California’s insurance market to ensure resiliency.
Looking Forward
We continue our initiatives related to climate resilience and greater access to insurance. The former includes support of and investment in insurtechs that offer products promoting climate resilience; the continued deployment of HazardHub research and data analytics to help insurers create more precise climate risk models; and the continuation of partnerships with a climate focus, such as our current partnership with Climigration Network. In regard to greater access to insurance, we look forward to staying involved in conversations on the critical topics of risk mitigation and prevention, risk assessment and pricing, the protection gap, and catastrophe response.
As we consider the feasibility of further integrating a sustainability-focus into our AI and machine learning strategies, we will continue to monitor our and our customers’ AWS-related emissions for any potential increases and expect to report out on both relevant product updates as well as our aggregate AWS emissions.