The Banff release of InsuranceSuite, our second cloud release of PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter, and BillingCenter, includes a number of new features designed to help insurers engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. Like the ski resort names imply, these releases are coming rapidly – every six months.
Guidewire’s core products each added new capabilities in Banff. PolicyCenter’s Advanced Product Designer now includes the ability to create Product Editions with effective dates, allowing insurers to update coverages and other product model elements and deploy them, with effective dates, making product updates more efficient than ever. This enables an agile response to rapid changes in market demands.
In BillingCenter, the charge granularity that was first offered in Aspen serves as the foundation for a new Partial Charge Commissioning feature, which allows insurers to specify which portions of a charge are commissionable. This feature will be particularly valuable to insurers in the EMEA and APAC regions, who frequently need to structure commissions this way.
And ClaimCenter now features the Claim Migration Tool, which standardizes the migration of claims from legacy systems into ClaimCenter. This significantly reduces the cost and risk of claim migration, and best of all, it can now be done with zero downtime!
Some Banff enhancements benefit all three InsuranceSuite products. These developments are foundational not only to our customers’ current work, but to future innovation as well. One such area of development is Guidewire Analytics. The Embedded Analytics Framework ensures that insight is surfaced in the context of business processes, where it has the most value. Analytics are more critical every day, and we are enabling insurers to use data where they need it, when they need it, to do amazing things for their customers. Keep an eye out for future blog posts about specific enhancements to all of Guidewire’s Analytics offerings.
Another necessity for innovative insurers is access to an ecosystem and the ability to tie in new solutions to their core systems. The InsuranceSuite Cloud API addresses this need, allowing insurers to easily connect apps and services and build their ecosystems with a common, standardized skill set that requires less specialized training than previous methods. You can read more about this in my colleague Rob Sloan’s post here.
It’s not just APIs making things faster for insurers in Banff, however. A collection of new SurePath content will bring efficiency and innovation across the InsuranceSuite applications.
In Aspen, we redefined what it means to be a core platform by including digital capabilities with the InsuranceSuite products (as opposed to offering them under a separate license) -- acknowledging that digital is no longer a “nice to have.” With the Banff release, all those capabilities now leverage Guidewire Jutro. This design system and experience framework accelerates the design and development of user experiences and works together with Advanced Product Designer to bring efficiency to the entire product design and deployment process.
Finally, to ensure that self-managed InsuranceSuite customers on versions 8, 9, and 10 can take full advantage of all Guidewire Cloud Platform has to offer (including all the features discussed here), we’ve created a new upgrade approach, CloudDirect, that uses tooling and services to reduce complexity and enable insurers to realize cloud benefits sooner.
For details about all of this new Banff functionality and more, visit the Banff website, read the blog post and press release, or check out the InsuranceSuite-focused sessions from our recent virtual user conference, Connections Reimagined: