As the insurance industry continues to evolve, conferences like Guidewire Connections provide an invaluable platform for leaders, innovators, and experts to come together and discuss ways to move the industry forward. At this year’s conference, hosted at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, TN, attendees gathered to discuss the theme “Agility in Action.” The focus of the keynotes, as well as the sessions and discussions, was on how to leverage technology innovation to improve performance and transform the business of insurance.
As a gold plus sponsor at this year’s conference, ValueMomentum’s team had a large presence and contributed to the overall theme of agility with a customer panel discussion titled, “Navigating Cloud Transition: Real-World Insights from Insurers.” Experts on our team also met with insurance leaders to demonstrate how AI and automation can be implemented across product, underwriting, distribution, and claims to optimize workflows, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.
Members of the ValueMomentum team at the company booth at Guidewire Connections
Transformation Insights From Guidewire Connections
With the focus of advancing the industry on everyone’s mind, here are three key insights from the conference to help insurers stimulate the transformation of their business.
1. Creating agility and scalability through modern technology is critical.
Insurers are recognizing that to remain competitive, they must adopt agile practices and scalable systems that allow them to quickly adapt to market shifts, customer demands, and new technologies. Agility is about more than just speed — it’s about flexibility. By adopting cloud-based solutions and embracing modern technologies, insurers can streamline claims processing, improve underwriting accuracy, and enhance customer service, all while keeping costs in check.
Scalability, on the other hand, ensures that insurers can grow without encountering bottlenecks. With platforms that can scale alongside their business, insurers can handle an expanding customer base, more complex insurance products, and increasingly sophisticated analytics demands.
Guidewire’s Chief Product Officer, Diego Devalle, shared that Guidewire is addressing the issue of agility and scalability in its platform by shifting its focus from new features to configurability in its new version, Las Lenas. This also includes adding a product model definition to help with product development, providing extensions to enable market-specific capabilities, offering tools to leverage data as an asset, and including an autopilot for workflow automation feature, among other capabilities.
Toward the goal of achieving agility and scalability, insurers are also externalizing certain insurance functions — such as rating, underwriting, and digital experience — and looking to integrate their core systems with partner platforms that will provide the full functionality they need to compete and grow.
2. Being in the cloud is becoming table stakes.
In his opening keynote, Guidewire CEO Mike Rosenbaum shared that this year, the number of customers on cloud exceeded the number of customers on premises for the first time, with 51% of InsuranceSuite users on Guidewire Cloud.
This change of perspective on cloud was reflected in the number of conference sessions focused on migrating to the cloud, including ValueMomentum’s own customer panel. Our Executive Vice President, Abhijeet Jhaveri, moderated a panel that included Gayathri Mariappan, AVP of IT at RLI Insurance Company; Shilynn Francisco, VP of Information Systems at Idaho Farm Bureau; and Matt Jaeger, IT Director at Pekin Insurance. The panelists shared their experiences leading their organization’s cloud migration projects and discussed why they moved to Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP), obstacles to look out for during the migration, and advice for navigating these complex initiatives.
ValueMomentum EVP Abhijeet Jhaveri (left) with panelists Gayathri Mariappan, AVP of IT, RLI Insurance; Matt Jaeger, IT Director, Pekin Insurance; and Shilynn Francisco, VP of Information Systems, Idaho Farm Bureau.
For RLI, an early adopter of cloud, Mariappan shared that the company’s successful ClaimCenter migration had a lot to do with strategy and prioritization. She advised, “Make sure you have an integration strategy and a data strategy in place that can take you from day one all the way to go-live and see it through. Also, make sure that prioritization is talked about very openly. When our ClaimCenter came in, everything else moved out of the way; that took first priority. People had to wait in line.”
For Idaho Farm Bureau, still in the middle of its InsuranceSuite migration, Francisco shared that paying special attention to the planning phase was critical to starting the project quickly. This included getting the proper training and certifications for team members. She recommended, “Ensure that your team can focus 100% on this project so that you don’t miss deadlines. Work with your SIs to make sure that you’ve got an appropriate amount of cloud code merges to meet your business needs.”
Having completed both an InsuranceSuite and a Producer Engage migration at Pekin Insurance, Jaeger echoed the other panelists. He suggested, “It’s important that your team feels confident with the migration. Provide them with hands-on training. Get them sandboxes; get them lower environments for which they can apply what they are learning. Know the different business priorities that are being planned so that you can manage expectations along the way and adapt to the situation.”
3. Apply innovation and learn fast to deliver more value.
Across the many breakout sessions and keynotes, it was clear that innovation is taking a front seat in the insurance industry. Insurers and vendor partners shared how they are accelerating transformation across the insurance value chain with AI, data and advanced analytics, and modern platforms and tools. Key areas where insurers are applying innovation include pricing, product design, underwriting, digital ecosystems, risk management, digital payments, customer experience, and digital claims.
A common theme shared by many, especially when it came to embracing innovation, was learn fast and iterate. Given the constant need for insurers to transform so that they can stay competitive, it is critical that insurers are deliberate in how they apply innovation: The lessons learned as well as the impact of the innovation must be clear.
Understanding the technologies and the capabilities they provide is also important so that the full value of the innovation can be leveraged. This is particularly true for core platforms, given that most insurers customize core systems to fit their business, and that complexity is what will be a challenge for insurers as they look to move to the cloud.
Travelers’ EVP and CTO Mojgan Lefebvre said it best when she spoke on Travelers’ adoption of AI, data, cloud-first, and digital experience technologies. She advised insurers to “stay common as possible, unique as necessary” when it came to their platforms to enable scalability and agility.
Creating Agility and Scalability to Foster Future Success
Guidewire Connections 2024 provided a comprehensive look at how insurers can harness agility, scalability, and cloud migration to transform their businesses and thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.
As the insurance industry continues to embrace digital transformation, technologies that enhance operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and enable data-driven decision-making are becoming more critical than ever.
Carriers that prioritize innovation will be better positioned to drive growth, strengthen their competitive edge, and ultimately deliver greater value to their customers. To find out more about how Guidewire Cloud has helped Pekin Insurance drive growth, read our case study Pekin Partners With ValueMomentum for Multi-State Expansion on Guidewire Cloud.