„We did want a solution that’s run by the cloud, because we think it enables us to be able to scale better in terms of peak demand, and that’s critical for our business."
Gina Schwitzgebel-Hardy, General Manager
North Carolina Joint Underwriting Association
As the frequency and costs of weather-related events rise, so do the needs of insurers and their policyholders. Case in point: Of the 374,000 coastal area customers they serve, North Carolina Joint Underwriting Association (NCJUA) had 100,000 policyholders impacted by 2018 Hurricane Florence, the largest event in the insurer’s history.
NCJUA and its counterpart, North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA), comprise a not-for-profit coastal property insurance pool that is considered by the state of North Carolina as the “insurer of last resort.” In this role, the capability to serve the needs of their policyholders is paramount.
The organization prides itself on preparedness, and Hurricane Florence is no exception. Having deployed Guidewire InsuranceNow, the organization took definitive steps ahead of the hurricane to scale up its response teams, getting them trained quickly on the new system and positioning them to be physically available in the days after the storm.
“We need to make sure they are adequately prepared and that it’s an easy system to maneuver in and to be proficient in, so we can get payments in the hands of our policyholders quickly,” said Bob Eades, Director of Claims at NCJUA.
Aside from the secure cloud platform making it easy to implement changes and see results in real time, one of the backbones of the technology is in its straight-through processing capabilities.
“In the past we’ve had to wait for cycles, and in particular, like on a holiday or weekend, that can be a three- or four-day process before a check goes out the door,” said Vicki Fisher, Claims Manager at NCJUA. “So it has allowed us to service the customer much faster.”
And although the organization manages through complex workflows related to frequency and severity issues, the technology itself is responsive without having to be customized.
“With 374,000 customers, we have to deal with every agent in every distribution channel and 200 member companies for claims,” said Gina Williams Schwitzgebel, General Manager at NCJUA. “For us, not having to do any customization I think speaks volumes. Guidewire was able to help us work through our processes, thinking about best practices and trying to think about ways to look at the configuration we already had in the system to try to replicate the workflows that we needed.”
If Hurricane Florence was a testing ground for InsuranceNow, it passed with flying colors. Running systems 24 hours a day, with the Guidewire platform, NCJUA was able to assign claims out to independent adjusters at about 20 per minute.
