Earlier this month, Canadian ICMIF member Gore Mutual Insurance Company (Gore Mutual) was recognised as one of the winners of Guidewire’s 2021 Innovation Awards, for improving broker, customer, and employee experiences with InsuranceSuite in Guidewire Cloud.

In their fifteenth year, this year’s awards honour Guidewire customers that are adapting to an accelerating pace of industry change and evolving customer needs in innovative ways. The three winners were announced during Connections, Guidewire’s annual customer conference.

As the first Canadian insurer to use Guidewire Cloud to deploy the full InsuranceSuite, Gore Mutual sought to improve its broker/agent experience and provide a streamlined process flow. With an enhanced system, brokers could focus less on the mechanics of using the organization’s system and more on finding the right set of protections for the customer – letting them focus on building a strong relationship with the policyholder. In addition, Gore Mutual aimed to provide brokers with an authentication model that focuses on ease-of-use, while still employing high levels of security.

“We’re honoured to receive the global technology Innovation Award from Guidewire. It’s only possible because of the amazing people that we have at Gore Mutual. Their talent and agility have allowed us to do this work and be an industry leader.” said Jas Dhindsa (pictured), Chief Technology and Data Officer, Gore Mutual.

During Guidewire Connections 2021, Gore Mutual’s CEO Andy Taylor delivered a keynote presentation “Legacy to Leader”, sharing the mutual insurer’s bold strategy to transform its business operations from a mid-size, regional carrier to a national scale, purpose-driven, digitally-led insurer.

Building on the momentum in the second year of its Next Horizon strategy, Gore Mutual reached a significant milestone on its transformational journey. In July 2021, Gore Mutual introduced InsuranceSuite in Guidewire Cloud, launching this policy, billing and claims suite simultaneously to bring full-service capabilities to its core business operations, enabling brokers/agents to provide their customers with faster and more efficient service. To date, Gore Mutual has grown its business by over 20% across personal and commercial insurance as a direct result of improvements made to operating models and competitive pricing.

“We congratulate this year’s Guidewire Innovation Award winners,” said Brian Desmond, Chief Marketing Officer, Guidewire Software. “We were impressed with the high quality of the entries. Our customers continually inspire us with the innovative ways in which they leverage Guidewire to better serve their policyholders and agents, enhance operational efficiencies, and meet their IT and business objectives.”

Benefits Gore Mutual is receiving include:

• Enhanced and secure broker connectivity – Seamless broker management system (BMS) integration to support fully digitised broker workflows (upload, inquiry, download, and electronic documents);
• Fully digitised sales journey – Fast and consistent broker real-time quoting (sub-second response times for >95% transactions) and straight-through processing (<four minutes end-to-end);
• Digitised servicing journey – Direct Guidewire access to allow servicing in real-time (policy, billing and claims) via Guidewire digital technology; and
• Performance enhancements – Real-time and on-demand data and analytics-enabled via centralised enterprise data-warehouse (on Cloud) providing a 360-degree policy lifecycle view and business performance reporting, both delivering enhanced/personalised broker/customer experiences and business-related insights for optimisation enablement.

Photo credit: Guidewire