This week, Canadian ICMIF member Wawanesa was announced as one of the winners of Guidewire’s 2020 Innovation Awards, honouring insurers that are adapting to an accelerating pace of industry change and evolving customer needs in innovative ways.
In their fourteenth year, this year’s awards – announced during Guidewire’s annual Connections Reimagined conference – recognised four companies that have best demonstrated innovation leading to business and IT benefits experienced through the use of Guidewire.
Wawanesa was recognised for its Strategic Systems Renewal initiative, an enterprise-wide digital strategy that included multiple Guidewire implementations and is improving sales, distribution, and the overall insurance experience for customers and brokers.
Wawanesa embarked on its Guidewire journey, partnering with Capgemini and other local partners, and invested in digital technology to acquire the ability to launch new products and new services in all its regions, obtain real-time rating, and be able to go to market more quickly than before. The organization also needed the ability to take advantage of data-driven decision-making and better tailor the products offered to its customers. Wawanesa’s goal was to transform the way its brokers and customers interacted with the company, focusing on the experience for customers and broker partners.
After implementing the Guidewire platform, Wawanesa is now able to be more responsive to market changes, with 60-80 rate changes across the enterprise in a year, a notable improvement over the previous 12-15; significantly reduce the use of paper and postage; and enhance operational efficiencies resulting in increased levels of service to its policyholders and brokers.
In August, Wawanesa announced that it has successfully brought commercial and garage property products onto its Guidewire InsuranceSuite™ platform, placing the mutual insurer among the first insurance providers in Canada to have its entire product suite online. These new digital capabilities support Wawanesa and its broker community in the goal of providing exceptional customer service.
“This is the last step in a technological transformation that we started in 2015 and has culminated in a new digital foundation that allows us to integrate with broker APIs, digitize our business processes, respond to market conditions quickly and launch new products in partnership with our brokers,” said Wawanesa’s President of Canadian P&C Operations, Carol Jardine.
“As a mutual, we and our brokers serve our policyholders. We are so pleased that this CAD 300 million investment in technology has strategically positioned us to meet and exceed today’s and future customers’ digital expectations of insurers.”
Carol Jardine recognised as a leading global insurance professional
Earlier this month, Wawanesa’s Carol Jardine (pictured) was named to the Insurance Business Global 100 list for 2021. Now in its second year, this list of the biggest names in insurance put together by global publication Insurance Business, shines a spotlight on outstanding industry professionals who are making a positive difference and helping drive change across the sector.
Recognised alongside other outstanding insurance professionals from around the world, Carol is a strong voice for Wawanesa’s mutual ownership structure, a champion for the value of brokers, and dedicated to keeping customer service at the heart of technological innovation.
Earlier this year, Carol was also featured on Insurance Business Canada magazine’s 2020 Elite Women list, which highlighted 45 women who are forging a path for future generations of insurance professionals through today’s especially challenging times.
