How Velocity Engages, Innovates, And Grows Efficiently

Business Benefits

• Lowered total cost of ownership by 60%

• Doubled profitability over two years

• Improved STP by 18% (from 80% to 98%)

• 70% fewer support tickets submitted

• Built 11 new commercial lines products in eight months

The Story

Velocity Risk Underwriters (Velocity) provides innovative solutions for commercial property and business owners to transfer risk to global capital sources, specializing in underwriting services and claims management for perils like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and fire in the United States. Before adopting InsuranceNow, the managing general agent faced challenges with a slow, inflexible system that presented hurdles for its internal underwriters and external brokers and agents and ultimately hindered competitiveness.

"The largest challenge was the speed of the old system,” said CEO Jake Rothfuss. “To be competitive in insurance, you need to get quotes quickly; it took us 10, 15, 20 minutes."

Due to increased business volume, Velocity needed a dynamic system for frequent adjustments in areas like product configuration and pricing.

We needed a customizable platform to support the complexity and quantity of business we do for our small and midsize (SMB) business units.

Chris Gundersen, Chief Technology Officer

Velocity Risk Underwriters

Velocity chose InsuranceNow for its scalability, comprehensive capabilities, and hosting by AWS.

The implementation process, in collaboration with Guidewire and Cognizant, ensured a smooth transition. Gundersen noted, "The Guidewire team brought tremendous product and technical expertise. They helped us meet our business demands through leveraging existing InsuranceNow capabilities or building out new ones."

InsuranceNow's automation played a crucial role in doubling Velocity's profitability over two years. "We can give our producers a lot of capabilities they did not have in prior policy administration systems, and its support and maintenance are significantly less — about 60% less than our previous platform," Gundersen said.

Velocity built 11 brand new commercial lines products in eight months.

In our old platform that would have taken us three and a half years, and that was a lot of pain, bugs, and regression. We didn’t feel that within InsuranceNow.

Sean Rand, VP of Technology

Velocity Risk Underwriters

Another advantage of the new platform is that product changes can now happen in days rather than months. "If we implement on a Monday, it will already be in production by Wednesday — three days later,” said Rand. “We're not talking two rate changes; we're talking across 11 different products and thousands of different rates."

Rothfuss highlighted the impact on the bottom line, "We have doubled our profitability over the last two years, and part of that is absolutely due to being able to ask the right questions and have the right pricing on accounts thanks to the fast turnaround that we get in InsuranceNow."

With InsuranceNow in place, Velocity can expand to new markets. "Today, we have two business segments, but I can easily see that we'll be able to add a third, a fourth, a fifth business segment in pretty rapid succession with InsuranceNow by our side," Rothfuss said.

The platform's efficiency positions Velocity for even more growth and the delivery of innovation and the highest level of service to its agents and customers.