The opportunity that the Guidewire Analytics team aims to address is: how to enable every insurance worker—from brokers to underwriters to claims officers— with the analytical insight needed to make better decisions, to be what we call “brilliant in the moment”.
With the Banff release of the Guidewire platform, we have made significant progress toward this goal with the introduction of the industry’s first closed-loop analytics platform!
The Closed-Loop Analytics Platform
The platform, as seen in the picture above, is designed around four key principles that not only turn existing information into future predictions, but also enable those predictions to leverage external and syndicated data to become even more powerful, and adapt automatically to changing business conditions.
With the Banff release we have added significant new capabilities across all of the four key principles.
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Leverage your data: For any insurer, access to transactional core system data is absolutely critical to augment and support an enterprise-wide data strategy. This is even more critical for core systems deployed in the cloud. Guidewire Cloud Data Access makes this possible with secure access to raw (uncurated) Guidewire InsuranceSuite data, including capturing all intra-daily changes in InsuranceSuite at a low latency. With Banff, Cloud Data Access is now generally available worldwide.
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Enrich your insight: The use of external, behavioral, non-obvious, and syndicated data is proven to enhance the lift and accuracy of predictive models, towards improving business outcomes. With Banff, we have added several new capabilities to enrich your insights:
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Data (more than 120 unique fields, mostly focused on U.S. businesses) collected through Guidewire Cyence for Small Business Workers' Compensation and Employment Practices Liability is now available for model building in Guidewire Predictive Analytics. In addition, insurers can also leverage third-party data using our APIs.
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For U.S. customers, Cyence for Small Business adds support for General Liability by leveraging behavioral, social, and environmental signals for risk differentiation. General Liability is a diverse coverage that faces many difficult dynamics, including increasing litigation, escalating claim severity, and unpredictable loss cost trends. Using only the name and address of any U.S. business, Cyence for Small Business can uncover a company’s entire digital footprint in less than 30 seconds – including consumer reviews, government records, safety violations, website attributes, local crime rates – displayed in a way that enables insurers to improve risk selection, build pricing models, and enforce underwriting guidelines.
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The rise of ransomware has been notable in recent years – threats have become more frequent and severe, increasing the number of cybercrime incidents, the downtime of enterprise systems, and the amount of extortion payments. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) – a key component of enabling remote work – was the number one attack vector, accounting for half of all ransomware incidents in 2019. Banff introduces a new Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Exposure Signal capability in Guidewire Cyence for Cyber Risk Management that helps underwriters assess the security of a company’s RDP. In addition, cyber underwriters can also leverage the Targeted Ransomware Event Modeling capability (available as a preview) for more granular risk assessment and pricing decisions.
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Embed intelligence: The Embedded Analytics Framework embeds real-time predictive insights into Guidewire PolicyCenter and Guidewire ClaimCenter by operationalizing multiple analytics uses cases in a matter of hours. With Banff, the framework is available out-of-the-box for cloud customers and can be used with simple configurations eliminating the need for a professional services project.
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Learn continuously: Constantly measuring model performance is key to creating business value. Over time, even the best models may not perform at optimal levels due to changes in input variables as well as operational and regulatory changes. The ability to actively monitor model performance across the organization is a critical component of any predictive analytics strategy. With Banff, full monitoring capablities of Predictive Analytics are available for models imported using the Bring-Your-Own-Model (BYOM) capability. This puts BYOM models on par with natively-built models.
Just as ABC is only the beginning of the English alphabet, we at Guidewire are only starting to realize the potential of the closed-loop analytics platform. We are excited to share these exciting Banff features with you, and we are already working on Cortina and beyond to deliver more improvements and innovations that make problem-solving simple, fast, and profitable so every insurance worker can be brilliant in the moment.
To learn more about Analytics; Banff; and the Closed-loop, I encourage you to watch the following Connections Reimagined 2020 sessions:
The Banff press release can be found here.