"The main driver of the project was to become relevant in the personal lines market again. When you look at the 2021 results, in the first quarter our new business sales were 32% over the prior year, in the second quarter they were up 168%, and in the third quarter they were up 228%."
Matt Wilcox, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Personal Lines
Encova Insurance
Encova Insurance (formerly Motorists Insurance Group) strives to be the most trusted and responsive carrier in the independent agency system. To achieve its goals, the company ― a network of P&C, life insurance, and insurance brokerage companies and agents ― decided to modernize both its technology infrastructure and operations to better address the evolving needs of its agents and policyholders.
The modernization project began in 2017, the insurer leveraged an innovative greenfield startup approach to deliver business and IT benefits with its transformational program, using Guidewire InsuranceSuite and digital capabilities. With Guidewire and other vendor technologies, it was able to create a brand-new commercial lines company.
Following that, Encova began looking at its personal lines book of business.
"We actually considered exiting the market in personal lines because our products and services had become so antiquated and we were no longer competitive. During that time in which we had put all our focus on commercial lines, we fell even further behind in personal lines."
John Kessler, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer
Encova
Encova decided to take the risk and move forward with transforming its personal lines. Development began in 2019. It took only 18 months to launch Encova’s first product on the new personal lines platform.
“We knew we had the infrastructure in place from an operational, organizational, financial, technology, and administrative perspective,” said Kessler.
As part of the transformation, Encova introduced a number of integrations because it expanded the number of products to price and underwrite.
Encova leadership credits Guidewire’s ecosystem for the success.
“This was a very collaborative effort across the entire spectrum of the organization,” said Matt Wilcox, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Personal Lines. “With the increased number of integrations, we certainly had to take advantage of the Guidewire accelerators. Integrations in the previous world would have been impossible for us because we had six different legacy systems as opposed to one platform.”
Since launching, Encova’s new business sales have increased. The straight-through-processing rate climbed.
By implementing digital capabilities and rebranding the agent portal as Encova Edge, the insurer was able to roll out a variety of features and functionality to agents that were not possible before. With CustomerEngage, Encova was able to deliver a state-of-the-art digital service for policyholders for all lines to enable access to policy information, billing history, claims, FNOL, and documents.
Among the many benefits afforded Encova, InsuranceSuite has enabled the company to standardize underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims management on a cohesive technology platform. Further, Encova can develop and execute best practices to deliver high levels of service to its independent agents and customers by empowering them with digital self-service claims, policy servicing, and quoting capabilities.
As Encova has continued to grow with Guidewire, it saw a need to expand the relationship even further. In 2024, the insurer announced it was moving to InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud.
"We selected Guidewire Cloud because it serves our ongoing digital transformation journey."
Casey Jordan, Vice President of Information Technology Application Services
Encova
Jordan added, “By leveraging InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud, we will be able to shift system maintenance to Guidewire, so we can stay current on the latest innovations and decrease our own on-premise technology infrastructure footprint, enabling our IT staff to focus on tasks that deliver value to our agents and policyholders." "We will also be able to manage risk by maturing our business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.”
