Grinnell Mutual, a century-old property and casualty insurer and
reinsurer, and Guidewire Software, Inc. (NYSE: GWRE), provider of the
industry platform Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers rely upon, today
announced that Grinnell Mutual has successfully deployed Guidewire
InsurancePlatform™ as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution via
Guidewire Cloud™. By leveraging InsurancePlatform in Guidewire Cloud,
Grinnell Mutual is now free to accelerate its business objectives to
adapt to changing market demands and enhance customer service.
Grinnell Mutual’s implementation project, internally called CONNECT, is
a business-led technology initiative to remake all of Grinnell Mutual’s
business interfaces by replacing its previous systems with
InsurancePlatform to support quoting, rating, underwriting, policy
generation, claims processing, and billing, offering end-to-end policy
management and issuance functions. The project was focused on providing
a quality product, rather than speed to market, to fulfill its
commitment to giving customers the best and staying on the forefront of
innovation.
With this in mind, the company adapted the CONNECT project schedule as
needed to accommodate a mid-project migration to Guidewire Cloud, which
varied from its initial selection of self-managed InsurancePlatform.
CONNECT culminated in the launch of Grinnell Compass, a new underwriting
company for a new multivariate auto insurance product in Pennsylvania,
as well as the introduction of Grinnell’s Home-Guard® product. CONNECT
is currently deploying InsurancePlatform via Guidewire Cloud to the rest
of its personal lines of business in Pennsylvania, followed by all of
the other states where it operates, and will conclude with its
commercial lines of business in those states.
“The insurance industry is being disrupted and customer expectations are
evolving,” said Ken Klug, co-executive sponsor of CONNECT and vice
president, Direct Claims, Grinnell Mutual. “Grinnell Mutual is embracing
this and forging ahead with best-in-class technology widely considered
the gold standard in the P&C insurance industry. Guidewire is a great
fit for our customer-centric business model, offering ease of use and
enabling us to do business with them and our agents the way they want
to. It’s a very exciting time!”
Roby Shay, chief information officer and vice president, Enterprise
Solutions, Grinnell Mutual, said, “The CONNECT project’s work, and the
implementation of Guidewire InsurancePlatform via Guidewire Cloud, is
something we have to do to position ourselves for the future.”
“What I found so interesting and heartening about my interactions with
the agents was that the technology was so intuitive that our
conversations focused on agents’ needs around products and services, and
not around how to work with the technology,” said Mike Shepardson,
assistant vice president, Sales, Service, and Specialty, Grinnell
Mutual. “It’s amazing to me that this thing we’ve been working so long
and so hard on to make user-friendly just faded into the background
because it was exactly that. When something that’s so complicated on the
back end looks easy to users, that’s a huge success.”
Guidewire Cloud is powered by AWS’s highly resilient cloud
infrastructure, with SLAs backed by experienced Guidewire teams and
SaaS-certified partners spanning application management, system
administration, security and compliance, upgrades, QA testing, health
checks, and other services. With Guidewire Cloud, insurers can focus on
business agility and better engagement while transferring
undifferentiating IT responsibilities to Guidewire.
“We congratulate Grinnell on its successful Guidewire Cloud
implementation project and the launch of Grinnell Compass in
Pennsylvania,” said Mike Polelle, chief delivery officer, Guidewire
Software. “We appreciate the confidence the company has placed in our
cloud services capabilities and admire its mission of cultivating trust
by delivering innovative solutions to all of its stakeholders – mutual
members, agents, policyholders, and employees.”
About Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Company
Located in Grinnell, Iowa, Grinnell Mutual has been in business since
1909. It is the 111th-largest property casualty insurance
company in the United States and the largest primary reinsurer of farm
mutual companies in North America. Its products are available in 19
states. For more information, please visit www.grinnellmutual.com.
About Guidewire Software
Guidewire delivers the industry platform that Property and Casualty
(P&C) insurers rely upon to adapt and succeed in a time of accelerating
change. We provide the software, services, and partner ecosystem to
enable our customers to run, differentiate, and grow their business. We
are privileged to serve more than 350 companies in 32 countries. For
more information, please visit www.guidewire.com
and follow us on twitter: @Guidewire_PandC.
NOTE: For information about Guidewire’s trademarks, visit https://www.guidewire.com/legal-notices.
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