Wawanesa Selects Guidewire for Rating, Underwriting, Policy Administration, and Billing

Guidewire PolicyCenter® and Guidewire BillingCenter® to help one of Canada’s largest Property/Casualty insurers increase its flexibility and enhance its broker and customer service capabilities

WINNIPEG Manitoba and FOSTER CITY Calif. , April 02, 2013

The Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company (Wawanesa), which provides coverage to almost 2 million policyholders in Canada and the United States, and Guidewire Software, Inc. (NYSE: GWRE), a provider of flexible core system software to Property/Casualty insurers, today announced that Wawanesa has selected Guidewire PolicyCenter® as its new underwriting and policy administration solution and Guidewire BillingCenter® to manage its billing operations. Wawanesa also has plans to use three Guidewire add-on modules: Guidewire Rating Management™, Guidewire Reinsurance Management™, and Guidewire Client Data Management™.

After successfully deploying Guidewire ClaimCenter® in 2011, Wawanesa decided to expand its Guidewire selection to include PolicyCenter and BillingCenter to help modernize its systems, transform its business processes, increase its flexibility, and take advantage of the solutions’ real-time functionality and built-in best practices. The company also wanted to provide its staff with the tools needed to properly service brokers and customers with the speed and methods by which these groups expect to be serviced.

“Our previous experience with ClaimCenter played a large part in selecting PolicyCenter and BillingCenter,” said Ken McCrea, president and chief executive officer, Wawanesa. “We were pleased with the high level of responsiveness displayed by the Guidewire team to any issues raised during the ClaimCenter implementation project. In addition, we respected Guidewire’s commitment to their cohesive vision of InsuranceSuite and their continuous demonstration of progress towards that vision.”

“We are looking forward to the benefits we will receive from PolicyCenter and BillingCenter especially the opportunities we will gain for improved servicing and contact with customers and brokers,” said Jeff Goy, vice president, Insurance Products, Wawanesa.

“From an IT perspective, PolicyCenter and BillingCenter will make it significantly easier to provide more services to our customers over the Internet in our direct markets, and in our broker markets, it will help us integrate more effectively with our brokers enabling them to quote and service their business more quickly and accurately,” added Cam Loeppky, vice president, Information Services, Wawanesa.

PolicyCenter and BillingCenter will enable Wawanesa to:

Leverage automated underwriting rules and real-time functionality to eliminate manual processes; Improve service levels for customers and brokers due to increased operational efficiencies; Accelerate its speed-to-market due to Guidewire’s easy-to-use configuration tools that let the right people with the right knowledge tailor offerings to particular market segments, avoiding the delays of custom IT coding; and Benefit from a suite of smartly integrated systems built on a modern technology platform designed to grow and change with its business.

“We welcome Wawanesa as a Guidewire InsuranceSuite customer, and we are pleased to extend our relationship with them,” said Steve Sherry, vice president, The Americas, Guidewire Software. “We admire Wawanesa’s dedication to providing their policyholders and brokers with excellent products and services, and we are looking forward to helping them meet their current and future business objectives.”

Guidewire PolicyCenter is a flexible underwriting and policy administration system that enables property/casualty insurers to grow business profitably by improving efficiency, while responding with agility to market opportunities and enhancing relationships with agents and customers. Designed to support both commercial and personal lines, PolicyCenter helps insurers streamline front and back office processes, from new business submission and quoting through policy renewals. PolicyCenter is available as a standalone system or as part of Guidewire InsuranceSuite™, and can be integrated to an insurer’s legacy systems or third party applications.

Guidewire BillingCenter is a comprehensive billing and receivables management system built on the core design principles of automation, control and flexibility. BillingCenter allows you to deliver insurance your way by making it easier to automate the billing lifecycle; design flexible billing, payment and delinquency plans; manage agent commissions; and enable rapid integration with external payment systems. BillingCenter is available as a standalone system or as part of Guidewire InsuranceSuite™, and can be integrated to a general (property and casualty) insurer’s legacy systems or third-party applications.