Garmisch: Guidewire's Newest Release Reimagines Insurance Product Design and More

Garmisch is named after Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a ski resort town in the picturesque alpine valleys of southern Germany. It is located at the foot of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain and some of the highlights include 3 skiing mountains, 40 kilometers (~25 miles) of slopes, and 4 downhill runs.

Similarly, Garmisch, Guidewire’s latest market-defining cloud release, features more than 25 highlights across platform, applications and content that boost innovation for P&C insurers. Garmisch helps insurers to further streamline the developer experience, drive efficiency and growth, and accelerate time to market. In addition, starting with Garmisch, Guidewire increases the release cadence from two to three releases each year through accelerated automation of updates.

We’ve covered a lot of territory from Aspen to Garmisch (A-to-G).This is our G (seventh release), so let’s review seven highlights:

A. APD functionality for Claims (available as early access): Continuing our vision of product-defined development, Garmisch expands the power of Advanced Product Designer (APD) to rapidly deliver new claims experiences. This will foster collaboration between underwriting, policy and claims teams, while simplifying the IT process through seamless generation of the product model, user interface, and claim intake flows.

B. BillingCenter APIs: Empower policyholders and agents to view and pay invoices conveniently with new insurance billing software BillingCenter APIs. The Pay Direct Bill API allows better policy administration, so policyholders to pay their direct bill invoices while the View Invoice API allows policyholders to view invoice details such as the breakdown of premium vs. taxes vs. fees.

C. Commercial Lines: Garmisch improves underwriting precision and flexibility for the London Market with no-code risk classification configuration, enhanced data quality, and improved message handling. In addition, Garmisch introduces a new solution for parametric insurance which can provide significant value for insurers in the current economic environment of high inflation, recession risk, reduced reinsurance capacity, higher rates, and lower policy limits.

D. Data Masking for NPEs: Many insurers rely on having a copy of production data in their non-production environments (NPEs) for testing, debugging, and other use-cases. Garmisch introduces a new self-service tool on the Guidewire Cloud Console that delivers sanitized copies of production data into an NPE. The service is secure, easy to configure, and features role-based access and column-level control over the data.

E. Expanded App Marketplace: Since Flaine, Guidewire’s ecosystem has expanded with 25 new and updated apps on the Guidewire Marketplace that help reduce costs and increase speed-to-market. All of the new apps have been vetted to ensure they are compatible, secure, high quality, and provide business value for insurers.

F. Faster Integrations: Integration Gateway features a new and improved user experience with Garmisch. This will not only make integrations faster and easier but also help insurers better manage the lifecycle of integration apps and accelerate implementations with templates. Enhancements also feature self-service to promote builds from NPE to pre-production and production environments.

G. Guidewire GO for More Markets: Garmisch expands Guidewire GO capabilities for markets around the world. For Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) insurers, GO packages feature Australian Business Number (ABN) lookup, tax inclusive/exclusive invoices with the Australian Goods and Services Tax (GST) package, and New Zealand localization. For Japanese insurers, GO offers a loss estimate calculator, fault assessment calculator, police report requests, and anti-fraud checks for Personal Auto and Accident & Health lines. Garmisch also adds InsuranceNow GO for Commercial Property which includes product content, default integrations, and forms that help insurers launch a commercial property line of business twice as fast as before.

There is much more in Garmisch. In case you’re wondering if I can list highlights as we go further down the alphabet, Garmisch includes the XGBoost machine learning library in Predict. To learn more, I invite you to explore our Release Highlights, visit our landing page, or read our press release.