It was my pleasure to welcome Guidewire customers, partners, and colleagues to our 2023 Guidewire Insurance Forum in Paris last month. After four years away, it was great to see so many people able to attend our conference, following a multi-year COVID break, and join us in the spectacular surroundings of the Ballroom at InterContinental Paris - Le Grand.
At this important moment in time for the insurance industry, with so many challenges and opportunities converging, it’s vital for us to come together to look at the insurance landscape and consider how best to move forward in the continued service of society at large. This is hugely important for us at Guidewire, and we are privileged to have a role in building this broader community across the EMEA region.
If we look at the myriad of challenges and opportunities facing the industry, I firmly believe that technology and data will play a vital role in helping insurers to deal with the challenges better, and take advantage of the opportunities. Indeed, I see the industry as being on a journey to move from risk allocation, to more risk mitigation, and ultimately being able to remove risk from parts of everyday life. To my mind, this will be enabled by a mix of people with context, technology, data, analytics, and AI. For this reason, our community of customers, SI partners, solution partners, and Guidewire Insurtech Vanguard members, coming together to discuss how best to collaborate, share thought leadership, and work to improve our collective service of the general insurance industry is imperative.
In the EMEA region we are proud to have 73 customers, from 17 countries in our community, and many were able to join us.
In a keynote session, our CEO, Mike Rosenbaum, talked about accelerated change in the insurance industry and Guidewire’s vision and strategy to power insurers to make their businesses more effective and efficient, through evolving their use of technology and data. Mike discussed the importance of enabling insurers to improve customer experience, whilst also increasing revenue and market opportunities through entering new markets, launching new products, and taking advantage of new distribution channels. All of these strategic objectives require a modern, flexible, scalable, and secure platform at the heart of their businesses, and this is where we see the Guidewire Cloud being so central to the future state of the industry.
Diego Devalle, Chief Product Officer, shared highlights about our latest release, Garmisch, our seventh release in the last 3.5 years, which is nearly as many releases as we have had in the preceding 15 years.
Central to our community are our partners, many of whom were available during the day, as well as Guidewire experts, who were on hand to talk about Guidewire’s vision for the future and the evolution of our roadmap.
Most importantly, this event was an opportunity to hear from our customers, with stories about their success, their innovation, and their experiences:
Admiral: Helena Amodeo, Head of Technology Claims and Katie Victoria-Davies, Head of Product Claims, along with EY’s Philippe Piedigrossi, Partner Financial Services, Insurance Technology Transformation, described improving Admiral's market lead, driving value, and enhancing customer and staff experience with their Guidewire ClaimCenter deployment.
CNA Insurance: Pete Casa, Vice President, Product, Workflow & Development, with Appian’s, Gijsbert Cox, Industry Leader Insurance EMEA, talked about building CNA‘s global platform across core systems, seeing time savings, greater efficiency, and pipeline control.
Macif: Yann Arnaud, Director of Innovation, Guidewire’s first cloud customer in Europe, portrayed their route to core system transformation at enterprise-wide scale, to enable speed to market and the creation of new value propositions, whilst being responsive to ever-changing customer expectation, and also increasing ROI.
Ornikar: Philippe Maso y Guell Rivet, CEO, shared a perspective on their unique journey from Driving School to Digital Insurer, how they are setting up a technology ecosystem from scratch, and how they want to use their deep touchpoints with a segment of the market to create innovative insurance offerings.
Santam: Herman Crause, Head of Guidewire Systems and Hannes van Vuuren, Chief Digital Officer, presented their approach to core, digital, and data modernisation, and enabling their business strategies while focusing on growing ecosystems, with Guidewire PolicyCenter as the bedrock.
UnipolSai: Mario De Dominicis, Head of Claims Operations, depicted the vision behind their motor claims proposition, driven by changing customer demand, and empowered by a futuristic approach to leveraging data and predictive analytics - from FNOL to settlement.
We were also joined by Australian insurer, Hollard Insurance. Michael Medway, Program Manager, who explained their claims transformation programme with the aim of delivering simplification, effectiveness, compliant systems, and enhanced customer experience. The story of Hollard’s fast and value-focused deployment was a real talking-point for all attendees.
Our guest speaker was the former French soccer icon, David Ginola, who entertained us during an interview with Chief Marketing Officer, Brian Desmond, when we heard that anything can happen in life; it's all about creativity … creativity in everything you do.
In a session, hosted by Guidewire Chief Customer Officer, Christina Colby, we discussed one of the most pressing matters facing the industry, and society; how to react to climate and broader ESG challenges. Christina was joined by Aviva's Stuart Wright, Operations Net Zero Delivery Director and Pohjola’s, Nella Korhonen, Head of ESG, and they shared their organisations’ respective approaches to ESG and what this means for their customers.
Finally, our Chief Evangelist, Laura Drabik, explained how Guidewire is empowering Insurtech innovation through our incubation programme, Insurtech Vanguards, and invited the audience to speak with three member companies attending the conference: Iceye, Maptycs, and Quantexa.
And then it was time to wrap up, thank our community for making the day a real success and invite everyone to join us next year in London. Of course, it was also great that so many members of the community stayed on for a relaxed conversation about the future of the industry over a glass of champagne.
