To understand emerging risks, write profitable business, improve claims outcomes, and keep the competition in the rearview mirror, you need analytics firepower to make smarter, faster decisions and learn and adapt continuously. We’re ready to show you how you can do this with our Dobson release. I’m particularly excited to write this blog because with Dobson, (1) we’re launching Guidewire Live, (2) there are a lot of new and exciting capabilities, and (3) this is the first time in our series of ski-resort releases when I can say that I actually visited the country where the resort is located: beautiful New Zealand. In the world of marketing, good things come in threes!
So what is Guidewire Live? It’s a suite of analytics apps that deliver live insights across the insurance lifecycle. Guidewire Live makes every insurance decision smarter by leveraging curated intelligence from an array of high-value data sources, embedding intelligence into core processes, and learning continuously by monitoring business impact. Most important is the fact that Guidewire Live enables our customers to turn a system of record into a system of influence to achieve better outcomes.
Let’s journey down the slopes of Dobson to see how it all works.
Outsmart
Because data is the fuel for all analytics, getting the right data prepared for analytics projects is a significant effort — often up to 80% of the entire project. Guidewire’s acquisition of HazardHub emphasizes the P in P&C insurance. HazardHub is now integrated with PolicyCenter, enabling insurers to assess hazard risks for multiple personal and commercial properties in the United States. Insurers get comprehensive data based on more than 950 risk variables, including perils from air, water, earth, and fire. They can use that risk data to micro-segment, profitably write, and manage risks.
Cloud Data Access (CDA) is essential for cloud customers to access their data in near-real time. With Dobson, CDA now dynamically scales available resources based on the amount of data it needs to process. The deployment of CDA is automated for both non-production and production environments through the Guidewire Cloud Console (GCC). This will not only improve CDA performance but also result in a better developer experience.
Outpace
Dobson introduces a single unified API for risk assessments across all lines of business through HazardHub. Until now we had different APIs to query data and risk factors across various lines of business such as Workers’ Compensation, Employment Practices Liability, and General Liability. This unified API enables customers to return any possible combination of risk factors independent of line of business, with the added flexibility of being more specific about which risk factors/features, data source, and line of business users want to query. The unified API is also integrated with Predict, which makes more data available with faster appending during the model building process and also improves model lift and accuracy.
To harness the incredible value in the notes portions of PolicyCenter and ClaimCenter, in Cortina we started building a natural language processing (NLP) stack in predictive analytics. Dobson enhances the robustness of text-mining techniques (TF-IDF, FastText, and BERT) with more training data, easier deployment, and self-service for customers building their own models. Dobson also adds deep neural networks (DNN) via TensorFlow (Google’s open-source, deep learning framework) to the list of available predictive analytics algorithms. Now data scientists can build and experiment with DNNs along with all the other algorithms and see which one best fits their needs. Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) capabilities have been expanded with support for additional types of Python packages and some R packages. This gives customers more flexibility in creating models in their preferred packages without a requirement to convert to PMML.
Outperform
With Dobson, Compare — an application that enables proactive claims analysis and peer-performance benchmarking — offers full globalization with language and currency support for the same regions as InsuranceSuite.
Guidewire Live also introduces Canvas (formerly Claim Canvas), which is included with the ClaimCenter cloud subscription. Canvas alerts adjusters when observed weather doesn’t match the reported loss cause on property claims and when unclassified claims appear to qualify for a defined catastrophe. This helps reduce claim cycle times and opportunistic fraud. It also enables increased reinsurance recovery and customer satisfaction.
Putting it all together — Outsmart. Outpace. Outperform — Dobson accelerates the available library of Smart-Loop Analytics solutions to cover more lines of business and more use cases across underwriting, customer retention, and claims. If you have historical data in InsuranceSuite, Guidewire will build you the best available model, embed it in your workflow, and provide a dashboard to monitor business impact — all within two weeks with no services cost.
Did I mention good things come in threes? Onward to Elysian!