Last week, Guidewire Connections 2022 brought insurance and technology leaders together at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas for one of the year’s most anticipated user conferences. ValueMomentum was privileged to be a Gold Sponsor at Connections this year, delivering a speaking session with Pekin Insurance, connecting with clients and partners alike at our booth in the exhibit hall, and introducing our reference solution for specialty and commercial lines on the Guidewire platform.
A Digital Core to Address the Challenging Insurance Climate
As the insurance industry has recently experienced a variety of challenges—high inflation, geopolitical shocks, new customer expectations, talent shortages, and more—it’s become more critical than ever for insurers to distinguish themselves from their competitors to be successful.
Investing in customer experience, speed-to-market, and enhanced profitability is the key to driving business growth in this difficult business climate.
ValueMomentum and Pekin Insurance co-presented a breakout session—Optimizing CX, Profitability, and Growth on Cloud—to discuss these new challenges and share strategies on how to tackle them.
Presented by Avdhut Nadkarni, VP of ValueMomentum, and Amy Bingham, CIO of Pekin Insurance, the session addressed a dilemma many insurers face—how to navigate an increasingly competitive industry to claim new market opportunities and drive business growth.
Nadkarni directly spoke about the powerful market forces that are shaping insurers’ business strategies. Across ValueMomentum’s client base, he pointed out that insurers are investing in capabilities to build a foundation that will help them scale growth, maximize profitability, embrace innovation and delight customers. These capabilities include: digital distribution, API and microservices, SaaS/Cloud, digital operations, pricing innovation, emerging risk coverage, zero-touch claims, total experience, and more. Insurers are embarking on several transformation journeys – digital transformation, core transformation, data transformation, infrastructure and cloud transformation, and quality transformation – to build the digital core needed to drive future growth.
Cloud is a Competitive Advantage
Bingham then connected the market disruptions discussed by Nadkarni to the journey Pekin Insurance went through to build foundational capabilities. Similar to many other insurers, Pekin struggled with time to market issues, manual processes in business workflows and higher loss ratios and profitability issues. Their enterprise strategy was to expand geographically into other states, expand their commercial lines business portfolio and improve personal lines profitability. Across these three pillars as also the goal to enhance digital capabilities to improve customer experience.
With the Guidewire InsuranceSuite platform as their core, and working closely with ValueMomentum as its integration partner, Pekin set out to build a factory delivery model that will enable quick technology changes on the platform to accelerate expansion. Its “all in” approach when adopting Guidewire platform – PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ClaimsCenter, digital products, predictive analytics – allowed the company to iterate through the development of each state more quickly and become more efficiently at rolling out new products. A critical component to the success of their business strategy is the migration to Guidewire Cloud, which is slated to be completed in late 2023. This migration will bring Pekin to the current product release as well as will give the internal team more bandwidth to focus on delivering business outcomes.
To fully leverage this Guidewire SaaS as its platform for innovation, Bingham shared how she is applying her experience in building agile teams to develop a future-state IT operating model at Pekin. This new operating model is comprised of IT-led product teams, aligned to business teams and goals, working closely with key partners to provide skilled resources that are embedded within the product teams. Set up in this way, Pekin can move toward optimal IT with a full-scale adoption of a product-centric business model that operates through Agile practices in the near future.
Bingham also shared insights she learned from Pekin’s business transformation, which include:
- develop strategic partnerships,
- minimize the urge to customize,
- sunset legacy and duplicate systems,
- ensure proper knowledge sharing,
- establish change management,
- empower your teams.
Empowering Specialty and Commercial Carriers
In addition to co-presenting a breakout session, ValueMomentum also introduced a new reference solution focused on specialty and commercial insurance at Guidewire Connections 2022.
Carriers with commercial and specialty lines often face unique challenges, including extensive customization to standard products, delayed time-to-market, niche exposures, and the ordeal of selecting the right bureau-provided advisory loss costs, rates, and rules. To reduce these risks and accelerate implementations, ValueMomentum developed a reference solution for commercial and specialty lines on the Guidewire platform.
The reference solution includes several accelerators, including:
- Quick-start product definitions for coverages and exposures, associated forms inference, and underwriting rules
- Reference integrations with common third-party services and pre-fill and decision-making attributes
- Intelligent intake automation for new business, renewals, and claims—including ACORD and non-standard submissions
- Library of actionable use cases, traceability matrices, test scenarios and test cases, and intelligent automation solutions for functional, system, forms, and rate testing
- Reference architecture and project management assets
Our domain experts had the opportunity to demonstrate the solution to insurers looking to expand into the specialty and commercial lines as well as industry partners. Our conversations not only provided more insight into the needs of insurers in these lines of business, but also amplified our drive to help more insurers leverage their core systems to slash cost, reduces risk, expedite time-to-market, and develop the competitive edge needed to win in the industry.
Becoming a Modern Insurance Company
While the insurance industry certainly has more challenges today than it did even several years ago, those hurdles aren’t insurmountable. Through investing in your organization’s digital transformation—and intelligently navigating that journey—you can set your organization up for success.
Guidewire Connections 2022 focused on the transformative benefits of wisely leveraging technology, innovation, and the digital ecosystem to adapt to whatever headwinds affect the industry, and the enthusiastic response from attendees revealed there’s a real vitality in the future of insurance.
ValueMomentum is proud to strengthen its relationship with Guidewire by introducing our reference solution for commercial and specialty lines. Learn more about how we can help you maximize your investments in core systems here.
