Guidewire Offers Richer Functionality with Enhancements to InsuranceSuite 7

Guidewire Software (San Mateo, Calif.) has announced the availability of InsuranceSuite 7, the latest release of the vendor's core system suite for P&C insurers at the Guidewire Connections user conference in San Francisco this morning. The new release includes enhancements to Guidewire's PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter and BillingCenter, as well as three new modules that increase the suite's breadth of core process support, according to the vendor: Client Data Management, Rating Management, and Reinsurance Management.

The enhancements to InsuranceSuite 7 represent the evolution of Guidewire's products to provide both the flexibility of modern systems and the rich functionality of more traditional core system offerings, suggests Neil Betteridge, VP, strategy, Guidewire. "We're now in stage four, five or six for major releases of our core systems, so we have rich functionality but also the flexibility to tailor to an insurer's unique needs."

Until recently, insurers took a best-of-breed approach to achieve a combination of modern flexibility and both broad and deep functionality, according to Chad Hersh, a partner at New York-based research and advisory firm Novarica. ""However, selecting core systems with a common architecture and technology foundation but that offer the benefits of functionally rich solutions, such as Guidewire's InsuranceSuite, simplifies system maintenance and enables insurers to better utilize their internal talent to not just maintain the systems but also to help drive enhancements and process innovation," Hersh asserts.

Guidewire describes the new modules increasing the breadth of functionality available with InsuranceSuite 7 as follows:

- Guidewire Client Data Management: Delivers the capabilities to effectively manage customer contact data, and enables a comprehensive customer view across underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims systems.

-Guidewire Rating Management: Provides rate table management tools to ease the most common and frequent effort in rating maintenance.

- Guidewire Reinsurance Management: Delivers the automation needed to effectively manage ceded reinsurance processes.

The enhancements to InsuranceSuite 7 enable improvements in the following areas according to the vendor:

Customer focus: With InsuranceSuite 7, insurers gain better insight and understanding of their customers with access to a holistic view of the relationship enabling them to better serve their customers and agents, identify and act on revenue generating (e.g. cross-sell and up-sell) opportunities, and make better business decisions. New capabilities include: enhanced comparisons of quotes and payment options at the point of sale. Funds' tracking provides billing representatives with visibility to respond to customer inquiries immediately. Account Special Handling equips adjusters to deliver claims service tailored to the expectations of specific businesses or tiers of customers.

Business agility: Insurers need the ability to continually adapt to a changing environment and seize opportunities for profitable growth as they arise. With InsuranceSuite 7, business users gain concise views of their product portfolio, and product changes are seamlessly extended to claims management as well as policy administration. As part of InsuranceSuite 7, the Reinsurance Management module enables insurers to control their reinsured offerings with greater confidence of recognizing recoveries. Claims administrators can now quickly establish specific automated activities and notifications to be used for individual accounts.

Proactive catastrophe management: New capabilities in InsuranceSuite 7 enable insurers to quickly and efficiently respond to disasters. The lack of real-time insight into the scope and severity of an event has been cited by insurers as a top challenge in managing a catastrophe (CAT). ClaimCenter 7 responds with a Catastrophe Dashboard, complete with a Heat Map that highlights concentrations of CAT claims on a color-coded map in real-time so that the severity and span of the disaster are instantly visible. With this improved visibility, insurers can more easily determine which policies will likely have claims activity and they can then proactively contact those policyholders they believe affected and better manage claims for the selected area. Policy and billing hold capabilities enable coordinated, coherent response to an event across insurer operations.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio