The Challenge
The Solution
IMPROVED TIME OF QUOTE TO ISSUE USING STP
SUBMITTED 124 QUOTES AND BOUND NINE POLICIES IN JUST THE FIRST WEEK
ACHIEVED 85% STRAIGHT-THROUGH PROCESSING
“With Guidewire, we recognized their strong market penetration with some of the bigger players in the industry. This platform was going to continue to grow and adapt to the market. We’re getting some of the best thinking, not only of Guidewire, but of more than 540 customers they have.”
Roby Shay, COO and CIO
Grinnell Mutual
Located in Grinnell, Iowa, Grinnell Mutual is the 110th-largest P&C insurance company in the US and the largest primary reinsurer of farm mutual companies in North America. In business since 1909, the company offers direct lines of insurance to members in 19 states through a network of independent agencies.
The company has been on a fast track to keep pace with its members’ needs, deploying InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud. Grinnell Mutual’s implementation project, internally called CONNECT, is a phased, business-led technology initiative to remake all of Grinnell Mutual’s business interfaces by replacing its previous systems with InsuranceSuite to support quoting, rating, underwriting, policy generation, claims processing, and billing, offering end-to-end policy management and issuance functions.
“We didn’t have systems where employees could maximize efficiency and production. So, for years, we sort of cobbled things together. Our number one issue was how to add value to our products and the services we provide—not only for our agents but with actual policyholders and claimants.”
Jeff Menary, President and CEO
Grinnell Mutual Insurance
By leveraging PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, and ClaimCenter, Grinnell Mutual is now free to accelerate its business objectives to adapt to changing market demands and enhance customer service. Specifically, with Guidewire Cloud, Grinnell can focus on business agility and better engagement while transferring non-differentiating IT responsibilities to Guidewire.
Through Guidewire Cloud Platform, we can spend more time with our limited resources focused on things that actually create a competitive advantage versus things like patching servers or updating software,” said Roby Shay, COO and CIO of Grinnell Mutual. “That has been a cornerstone of this program. It enables our people to move on to higher-level tasks that will drive more value for those we serve.
Guidewire Cloud is powered by AWS’s highly resilient cloud infrastructure, with service-level agreements backed by experienced Guidewire teams and SaaS-certified partners spanning application management, system administration, security and compliance, upgrades, QA testing, health checks, and other services.
One of the significant metrics Grinnell Mutual is tracking is the straight-through processing rate. With its legacy platform, Shay explains, issues existed with straight-through processing. The number of policies going from quote to issue without human intervention was relatively low. “With Guidewire, those numbers show well over three times improvement in straight-through processing. The less time we spend dealing with minutiae in the policy life cycle, the better our personal customer service can be.”
The CONNECT cloud initiative has also opened the door to additional opportunities, culminating in the launch of Grinnell Compass, a new underwriting company for a new multivariate auto insurance product in Pennsylvania, as well as the introduction of Grinnell’s Home-Guard product. CONNECT is currently deploying InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud to the rest of its Personal lines of business in Pennsylvania, followed by all of the other states where it operates, and will conclude with its Commercial lines of business in those states.
