New Guidewire Solutions Help Insurers Tackle Their Biggest Challenges

  • Darin Reffitt

November 15, 2022

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I know what you’re probably thinking: the word “solutions” gets tossed around way too much in tech blogs. But bear with me for just a minute before you scroll past this one; I promise this one is different.

Because I’m not talking about solutions with a lower-case “s” here. I know as well as you do that every tech company offers solutions to help you in some way—many of which are overpromised and underdelivered.

But in this blog, I’m talking about Guidewire Solutions—with a capital “S”—which is a very specific category of offering for InsuranceSuite. Guidewire Solutions help insurers launch new products quickly and solve complex business challenges in a rapidly deployable manner on Guidewire Cloud.

What makes these Solutions unique is how they leverage the combined power of Guidewire Cloud Platform, Guidewire Data Platform, and the Guidewire Marketplace to enable insurers to capitalize on specific market opportunities while reducing total cost of ownership and minimizing risk.

Our first Guidewire Solution—Usage Based Insurance—debuted as part of our Cortina release in the spring of 2021. We followed that with offerings for Micro-BOP in the Dobson release and Embedded Insurance in Elysian.

But customer demand has driven increased momentum for creating these offerings, so with our Flaine release we’ve unveiled two new Guidewire Solutions: Excess & Surplus and Retention. We’ve also expanded our Embedded Insurance offering to include Alternative Distribution through Bindable.

Let’s look at each of these Solutions in more detail.

1. Excess & Surplus

The E&S market continues to experience record expansion. Direct written premiums have seen double-digit growth in each of the last four years, with direct statutory premiums reaching $76 billion in 2021. But for insurers looking to capitalize on this market opportunity, the technical hurdles have often been difficult to overcome, especially in a rapidly-deployable manner.

Our Guidewire Solution for Excess & Surplus has made that challenge a thing of the past; it’s never been easier to launch, administer, and scale an E&S program. Combining accessible market-specific content with the power of Advanced Product Designer to rapidly create new products and iterate on existing products, this new Solution gives insurers the flexibility and agility needed to support more complex E&S structuring. Whether your program will require support for co-insurance, intricate broker billing scenarios, frequent manuscript endorsements, or likely all of the above, InsuranceSuite’s multi-location, multi-currency platform has you covered.

While this Guidewire Solution was announced just last month, insurance carriers worldwide and Alliance partners like PwC are already leveraging the capabilities of this new Solution.

2. Retention

While different studies over the years have found slightly different results, there’s no denying that it’s far more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one—anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive, in fact.

But even a small increase in retention can make a big difference to your bottom line; we’ve estimated that just a 1% increase in retention equates to $4 million in annual savings for a $500 million insurer.

The challenging part is identifying the customers who are most likely to leave and then to predict the actions most likely to ensure that they don’t. Enter the Guidewire Solution for Retention.

This new Solution offers a standard development process for a retention program customized to your needs and goals. Bringing together insurance, demographic, and behavioral data from your system of record from other internal and external sources, we’ll help empower your team to take a scientific approach to retention based on modeling from Guidewire Predict or your own models for retention and profitability. We’ll help you identify targets for various retention efforts and measure effectiveness in real-time via easy-to-interpret dashboards:

This data-driven approach creates a continual feedback loop for improving retention, accelerating revenue growth, and improving ROI.

3. Alternative Distribution through Bindable

At Connections 2022, our annual user conference, Guidewire announced an expansion of the Guidewire Solution for Embedded Insurance to include Alternative Distribution through Bindable, the insurance technology leader for alternative distribution.

The expanded Solution brings together Guidewire GO content—prepackaged collections of configurable line-of-business content available to download from the Guidewire Marketplace—with Bindable’s distribution network of 500+ affinity partners and trusted brands.

This partnership makes it significantly easier for insurers to distribute their products to a wider audience and expand to new markets, while enabling trusted brands to meet the expanding needs of their customers and drive new revenue.

These Solutions are all available today. Guidewire customers should contact their Customer Account Managers for more information. Not a Guidewire customer yet? Contact our team to schedule a demo and learn about the power of Guidewire Solutions for yourself!

To learn more about the recent Flaine release, please read the press release and visit the website.