Guidewire Congratulates 2011 Innovation Award Winners - NFU Mutual, Sentry Insurance and Suncorp

Innovation Awards go to those companies best demonstrating innovative and value added use of Guidewire InsuranceSuite™ products

SAN MATEO, Calif., October 25, 2011: Guidewire Software, a provider of core system software to Property/Casualty (general) insurers, congratulates the winners of its 2011 Innovation Awards: NFU Mutual Insurance, Sentry Insurance, and Suncorp Group. Each winning company earned this recognition based on its innovative use or implementation of Guidewire’s underwriting and policy administration, claims management or billing system, resulting in key business value delivered to their respective organizations.

All Guidewire customers, whether in the process of implementing or extending their production-proven capabilities, were eligible for consideration. Winners were announced during Guidewire’s seventh annual conference – Connections 2011. The recognized projects demonstrate Guidewire technology at work helping these insurers deliver insurance their way. The 2011 winners are:

NFU Mutual Insurance Society Ltd – Accounts payable in BillingCenter

NFU Mutual’s network of tied agents provide a local, personal service to Britain’s rural community. To supplement their own policy range they also sell a number of non-NFU Mutual policies to help meet all the insurance needs of their clients. In these cases, NFU Mutual acts as an intermediary for these polices.

To meet this need, NFU Mutual extended Guidewire BillingCenter® to capture premium transactions for this business. This enables all client debt, to be managed and collected via a single client account and billed on the same invoice for seamless customer service. An additional benefit from this innovation is the elimination of the need to maintain these policies in a policy administration system, vastly saving on development and implementation effort and simplifying policy administration processes. BillingCenter manages the commission payments on these policies along with the NFU Mutual policies. NFU Mutual has been in-production with Guidewire BillingCenter since 2010. 

For additional information on NFU Mutual, visit http://www.nfumutual.co.uk/.

Sentry Insurance – Agent ease-of-use and policy administration straight through processing (STP)

Sentry’s most recent Guidewire PolicyCenter® production release created a platform to improve ease of use for its agents and provide support for Straight-Through-Processing (STP) for its Trucking business niche.

Using data from third party and internal sources to complement information captured during the quote process, the company was able to employ an underwriting scoring model to drive precision pricing via their real-time rating process. This enables Sentry to more accurately price a risk and in conjunction with the implementation of underwriting rules, Sentry is able to present the agent with a quote without requiring underwriter involvement. As a result, Sentry has reduced cycle times while improving customer satisfaction by being more responsive. They are also able to support more business without adding to their underwriting expense. Sentry Insurance has been an in-production PolicyCenter customer since 2008 and an in-production BillingCenter customer since 2009.

For additional information on Sentry Insurance, visit http://www.sentryinsurance.com/.  

Suncorp Group – Vendor Access Management Portal for Household Claims (VAMP)

VAMP is a web portal that helps Suncorp ensure its household insurance customers get their lives back on track sooner by streamlining the allocation of work to repairers and suppliers after lodgment of the claim (FNOL). With VAMP, repairers and suppliers are able to more effectively interact with Suncorp throughout the home claims process. An Australian "first" for home claims, it allows vendors to provide and receive information about individual jobs, as well as manage all work that has been allocated to them by Suncorp. Updates from vendors are available immediately to Suncorp employees in ClaimCenter, allowing the claim to be managed appropriately.   

VAMP streamlines and enhances supply chain management by enabling competitive quoting, converting quotes to electronic orders and supporting straight through payment processing via a single interface/process across all Suncorp brands. VAMP provides more consistent and accurate claim data as well as a holistic view of jobs across all Suncorp brands to improve work allocation efficiencies.  Suncorp has been an in-production ClaimCenter customer since 2007 and an in-production PolicyCenter customer since 2008.

For more information on Suncorp, visit http://www.suncorp.com.au/.

“On behalf of the entire Guidewire team, I congratulate the teams at NFU Mutual, Sentry, and Suncorp for their commitment to innovation, their successful projects, and this well deserved recognition,” said Marcus Ryu, chief executive officer, Guidewire. “We are especially pleased to see Guidewire customers around the world embrace our technology to help them deliver insurance offerings, customer service, and business processes that best support their strategic goals.”

About Guidewire Software

Guidewire Software is a provider of core system software to the global Property/Casualty (general) insurance industry. Designed to be flexible and scalable, Guidewire solutions give insurers the capability to deliver excellent service, increase market share and lower operating costs. Guidewire InsuranceSuite™, consisting of Guidewire PolicyCenter®, Guidewire ClaimCenter® and Guidewire BillingCenter® spans the key functional areas in insurance – underwriting and policy administration, claims management, and billing. Guidewire is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in Beijing, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. For more information, please visit http://www.guidewire.com/.