Meet Farmers Union Insurance

Business Benefits

• Improved speed-to-market by 50%–75% 
• Leveraged real-time access to data and analytics to make changes quickly

The Story

Incorporated in 1944, Farmers Union Insurance offers personal insurance for farmers, ranchers, homeowners, and businesses across North Dakota and Arkansas. Because the insurer relies on its captive agents, providing reliable communication and streamlined business processes to its distribution network is paramount.

Constrained with limited IT resources, Farmers Union relied on a legacy core system running on a dated midrange system. As a result, the company couldn’t make necessary changes to its system and struggled to adequately communicate with its agents. The answer was simple—replace on-premises core legacy applications with an all-in-one cloud-based systems platform.

“We were looking for a methodology and a web-based platform that would make us current, into the 21st century, as well as easier to do business with,” said Farmers Union CEO Mark Anderson. “We don’t market directly to our customers. We go through our captive agents, so we needed something that would be really handy for them to use to deliver our products.”

Farmers Union selected Guidewire’s InsuranceNow, a set of core operations that are fully deployed, maintained, monitored, and upgraded by Guidewire.

“InsuranceNow has all the modules built into it already: billing, claims, policy, processing, commissions, and integration with our general ledger,” said Branden Sorensen, Chief Business Development Officer at Farmers Union.

Farmers Union wanted backing by a team of security and product experts to free the firm from routine system maintenance and give it more time to focus on its business.
Deploying all modules of InsuranceNow at the same time, the insurer went live with its homeowners’, dwelling, personal watercraft, and personal umbrella products in October 2019—three months ahead of schedule and under budget.

Agents and customers can now use a customer portal to see in real time what’s happening with their policies, file a claim, request a change—replacing time-consuming manual processes of the past. And agents are excited about the company’s new ability to act quickly on feedback and resolve issues in a month that might have previously taken a year. “Farmers Union’s goals for the next three to five years is that we want to be a growth company,” said Mark Anderson. “We’ve always said that if we’re not growing, we’re dying, and certainly we’ve been on a growth path. We’re going to grow. We’re going to keep competing with the national companies and providing exceptional customer service. Best of all, Guidewire will help us along the way.”