Transformation Supports Ability to Retain Customers’ Trust
"We wanted an out-of-the-box product where we could partner with the vendor for updates, improve our ability to stay current with evolving technology, and achieve business needs."
Tim Tarnowski, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Business Technology
Germania Insurance
For more than 120 years, Germania Farm Mutual Insurance Association (GFMIA) has maintained its vision to protect Central Texas farmers with a pooled-risk philosophy. Today, GFMIA and its subsidiary companies—known as Germania Insurance—include more than 200,000 members and 400 local chapters and agencies throughout the state of Texas that offer auto, home, liability, and life insurance.
To honor the company’s mission to live up to its reputation as "The Insurance Texans Trust,” GFMIA adopted an organization-wide transformation initiative. As part of that plan, it chose to replace its existing core operating systems to provide a better overall experience for employees, agents, and policyholders.
“We wanted an out-of-the-box product where we could partner with the vendor for updates, improve our ability to stay current with evolving technology, and achieve business needs,” said Tim Tarnowski, Germania Insurance’s Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Business Technology.
Achieving this goal resulted in Germania’s decision to deploy Guidewire InsurancePlatform, a full complement of digital core system applications designed for increased business agility. With its new solutions for underwriting, policy administration, rating, claims, and billing, the company added Guidewire portal technology to improve digital communications with both agents and customers. Finally, Germania selected Guidewire’s data management and business intelligence solutions to gain greater business insights.
Germania’s overall results may be most remarkable in its claims area. The older, more manual, time-intensive processes are now gone, as are multiple systems and tools, direct SQL queries, stick counts, and reconciling all claims and exposure counts. By using Guidewire Explore for Claims (part of the Guidewire Live Analytics platform), claims managers can see how their teams are doing multiple times a day.
“The ability to self-serve with Explore and have every field available instantly has significantly improved our claims operations,” said Felicia Boykin, a Data Analyst at Germania. “Explore is a great tool to get fast answers.”
With its new Guidewire digital platform, Germania Insurance has significantly improved enterprise-wide user productivity and business process automation. In particular, the company can continue its commitment to better serving its members and claimants alike, providing the insurance rural Texans trust.
