Core Services Critical to any P&C Business Transformation

During the keynote session at our annual Connections user conference, Guidewire CEO Mike Rosenbaum outlined the essential core services we believe are required by insurers to optimize, adapt, and transform their business – services we are investing in and integrating into our platform.

When Guidewire embarked on its cloud journey, we started by investing heavily in the foundational platform capabilities essential for the efficient and secure deployment of our product in the cloud. These included critical components like environment management, observability, disaster recovery, and security, collectively forming the infrastructure on which our applications rely.

This cloud infrastructure is integral to enabling insurers to operate with greater efficiency, keeping technology continuously updated in order to access innovation from their core platform as well as ecosystem partners.

At the same time, Guidewire recognizes that in order to foster innovation in both insurance processes and product development, open new distribution channels, and effectively engage with customers digitally, insurers need more than just cloud infrastructure.

Based on feedback from our project and customer experiences, our cloud investments evolved naturally to provide a set of core services with our applications that we believe underpin every P&C business transformation.

Core System Services

At Connections, we announced these core services — offered with our core applications — as critical building blocks that provide value across our entire portfolio.

By extracting these services from our core applications and placing them in the platform layer, Guidewire can concentrate our creative and innovative engineering efforts on enhancing fundamental insurance business functions, ensuring their standardization and consistency throughout our product lineup. The result is a more flexible and capable system.

These core services are indispensable in supporting every phase of the P&C lifecycle. They bolster and extend the capabilities of our P&C core applications, empowering our customers to engage, innovate, and grow. These core services include, or will include:

1. Product - Advanced Product Designer empowers insurers to respond to market changes and seize new opportunities by rapidly launching and updating insurance products.

2. Integrations - Our Integration Framework includes comprehensive API access, App Events, and Integration Gateway. These capabilities aid insurers in integrating their core systems with increased access to cutting-edge innovation, enhancing interoperability and reducing the cost and complexity of maintaining secure, reliable connections with external systems.

3. Data - Data Platform and Data Studio provide near real-time access to your complete and comprehensive InsuranceSuite data, ensuring its accuracy and integrity throughout the insurance lifecycle.

4. Digital - To enhance engagement with customers, agents, adjusters, and other users, Jutro Digital Platform enables insurers to engage without limitations, creating personalized experiences for any user in any line of business and across any distribution channel.

5. Rating - Given the impact of regulatory changes related to climate risk in many regions worldwide, the ability to accurately rate and price according to new regulations can make the difference of millions of dollars in premiums and losses. With Guidewire Rating, insurers can promptly adapt to regulatory changes, maintain competitive pricing, and mitigate adverse selection.

6. Rules - Our Rules service democratizes rules management, making it easier for business users to create and update rules swiftly, leading to improved risk acceptance and the ability to resolve claims with speed and accuracy.

7. Workflow - Claims Autopilot Workflow Service empowers insurers to boost their operational efficiency by automating business processes across the P&C lifecycle. Starting with ClaimCenter in Innsbruck, insurers can accelerate their claims cycle times, increase straight-through processing, and enable their teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

With these interconnected, modular core services, insurers can move with greater speed and agility across the complete insurance lifecycle.

Why it Matters

In today's competitive landscape, cloud platforms have become the new battleground for core applications. Some vendors claim that because they started earlier, their cloud must be superior. Others put forth technical arguments, suggesting that a cloud platform built to accommodate a large existing customer base must be compromised compared to a novel, untested alternative.

These arguments miss the point. A core insurance platform delivered in the cloud must effectively address insurers’ most pressing business challenges, devoid of clichés or marketing jargon. We believe these services set Guidewire Cloud apart from the alternatives, not just in theory but also in practice.

The proof is found in widespread adoption and customer success: over 100 insurers now trust Guidewire Cloud as their core platform. This creates a virtuous cycle where our customers can benefit from the partner ecosystem, technical resources availability, and continued investment from Guidewire in the infrastructure and the core services they need to succeed.

In the coming months and years, these core services are expected to lay the groundwork for future products and capabilities we are developing. With them, for example, we could compose a new underwriting desktop, a reinsurance management module, or an embedded quoting solution. These core services give us and our customers what we need to make possible innovative solutions that address the most critical of P&C's business challenges. This prospect fills us with enthusiasm for the future of Guidewire and the insurance industry.

As we look to the future, we will continue to focus more of our investments on the business outcomes insurers want to achieve, and we are excited to be your partner in this endeavor.

Check out Mike Rosenbaum’s complete Connections keynote to learn more about the critical core services and how they are shaping the future of insurance.