Meet Mountain West Farm Bureau

Quickly Redesigns Product Offerings

logo - Mountain West Farm Bureau
  • Drawing of a person with a question mark icon

    The Challenge

    As part of its digital transformation strategy, Mountain West Farm Bureau needed a solution that would allow the insurer to consolidate multiple legacy systems into a new, modern platform.
  • An arrow hitting a bullseye icon

    The Solution

    InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud, as well as Guidewire Analytics, has allowed Mountain West to move fast on designing and redesigning products, improve straight-through processing, elevate the customer and agent experience, improve the loss ratio, and gain actionable insights into data.

Accomplishments That Count

8

TOOK 8 WEEKS TO REDESIGN ITS PERSONAL LINES BOOK OF BUSINESS

120

TOOK 120 DAYS TO DEVELOP FIVE PERSONAL LINES OF BUSINESS ON GUIDEWIRE CLOUD

80%

WITH DATA STUDIO AND EXPLORE, ACTUARIES SPEND 80% OF THEIR TIME ON ACTUARIAL WORK AND ONLY 20% ON DATA

Mountain West Farm Bureau

Tim Hayes, Mountain West Farm Bureau
The cloud product — especially the power of the cloud infrastructure in terms of speed and capabilities — is a force-multiplier. The ability to spin up environments at speeds that weren’t possible prior to this is, quite frankly, a game-changer for everyone.

Tim Hays, VP and Chief Information Officer

Mountain West Farm Bureau

How Mountain West Engages, Innovates, and Grows Efficiently

Business Benefits

  • Redesigned five personal lines of business in eight weeks
  • Developed five personal lines of business on the cloud in 120 days
  • Experienced updates in a matter of days versus months
  • Trimmed time to complete policy changes to minutes instead of days

The Story

Mountain West Farm Bureau was initially founded by the Wyoming Farm Bureau in 1948 and joined by the Montana Farm Bureau in 1958. Currently, the company offers multi-line insurance products to individuals, families, and small businesses throughout Wyoming and Montana, and in Colorado through a wholly owned company – 360 Insurance.

In June 2021, Mountain West turned to Guidewire to replace its legacy systems. The company subscribed to InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud. Soon after making that decision, the insurer realized that speed would be a big part of its story.

“The cloud product — especially the power of the cloud infrastructure in terms of speed and capabilities — is a force-multiplier,” says Tim Hays, Vice President and Chief Information Officer. He adds, “The ability to spin up environments at speeds that weren’t possible prior to this is, quite frankly, a game changer for everyone.”

Updates Take Days, Not Months - Mountain West Farm Bureau Insurance

Mountain West Farm Bureau shares how updates on Guidewire Cloud helps the insurer innovate.

It only took Mountain West 120 days to go live with five personal lines of business in one state.

Mountain West also praises Guidewire’s Advanced Product Designer (APD) for how quickly they were able to redesign those lines of business. With APD, it took only eight weeks to redesign the entire book of business for personal lines, which included auto, property, umbrella, inland marine, and personal and farm liability.

A Story of Speed With Advanced Product Designer - Mountain West Farm Bureau Insurance

Mountain West Farm Bureau shares how APD helps it better serve customers.

Mountain West has also taken advantage of Guidewire Analytics and Digital products.

The insurer has been a longtime Predict customer. In the first four years after adopting Predict for loss ratio modeling in the personal auto line, Mountain West saw approximately a 20% growth in written premium. Crediting Predict, the insurer is now writing more profitable business because of the adjustments made to premiums as a direct result of the modeling.

Mountain West is also using Explore for BillingCenter.

Daniel Sorensen, Mountain West Farm Bureau Insurance
Building an Explore dashboard is one of the easiest things I’ve done. Prior to Explore, the process for us to get actionable insights out of our data would have taken a month to figure out.

Daniel Sorensen, Actuarial Analyst

Mountain West Farm Bureau

Mountain West is using Data Studio in tandem with Explore. This enables the insurer to feed data into Data Studio where it can be used to build operational dashboards through Explore.

Building Dashboards with Explore

A Mountain West Farm Bureau actuarial analyst discusses how Guidewire Analytics makes it easier to extract actionable insights out of data and improve products and pricing.

With ProducerEngage, Mountain West has been able to give their agents direct access to quote business, make changes to existing policies in near real-time, and submit policies and applications. This has dropped the times to make policy changes from days to just minutes.

Crafting a Better Agent Experience - Mountain West Farm Bureau

Mountain West Farm Bureau takes advantage of Guidewire ProducerEngage to help agents work more efficiently.

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