My colleague, James Couzens, recently published a blog post describing the journey we’re on in delivering more complete local content for Australia and New Zealand. It prompted me to do something similar about our investments in the London Market. As a keen runner, my natural inclination is to focus on the long-term commitment that is required to ensure the success of our London Market customers, just like James did in writing about ANZ. First up, Guidewire is not new to the London Market and the unique flavour of requirements and challenges it presents. We’ve a large and growing claims customer base that we continue to serve. However, with policy administration and underwriting, London Market insurers face significant obstacles in upgrading from core, legacy systems that constrain them. Inflexible, surviving 30 plus years to serve a different time and need, these legacy systems increasingly limit modernisation and disadvantage insurers in a global marketplace. In recent months, we’ve been engaging with market stakeholders, as well as talking to solution partners and implementation partners, to align our London Market support, and continued investment, with the most critical needs of the market. Now, with our latest cloud release, Elysian, we’re delighted to bring to market a functionally-rich Guidewire PolicyCenter policy administration offering for insurers who place business through London. The release focuses on three themes. 1. Flexibility to support insurers’ business needs in a market that struggles to standardise data • A flexible coverage model to support insurer-specific requirements. Rapid user-driven (no-code) updates for next year’s plan; • Structured risk data (tailored to insurers’ needs) including structured schedules of values and the ability to deliver this data consistently across the estate.
2. Making the underwriter's job easier • Real-time insights into clients’ existing policies and claims history; • Tracking against annual targets (planning lines) with a real-time view of capacity available for new business; • Pre-bind checklists and workflow aligned to Lloyd’s MS2 practices; • Business-configurable rules and guard-rails, including authority checks on the delta between benchmark and written premiums.
3. A central hub to integrate and innovate • Exposing additional value with Guidewire assets like Cloud Data Platform, Cyence, and HazardHub; • Increasing automation and decreasing overheads, such as rekeying for underwriters and underwriting operations.
We're not stopping here. Much of our journey lies ahead, but we’re not planning to complete it alone. Our customers, our solution partners, and our London Market consulting partners will keep us company and guide us over the coming miles.