The Rise of Guidewire

Guidewire emerged as a market leader a decade ago and quickly expanded from a claims system to a platform with a collection of solutions that included policy, billing, claims, rating, portals, and analytics.2 The company’s offerings gained traction in the industry, and a growing number of insurance IT and business leaders began to consolidate their legacy systems onto the Guidewire platform. As the scope of the platform and the size of its customers grew it was common to see extended implementation timeframes that stretched to periods of several years.

While Guidewire was growing the world was changing. Insurers saw new technologies go mainstream (such as the cloud, IoT and AI), were pushed by their customers to provide new digital experiences (via portals and mobile apps), and they saw new opportunities open up with non-traditional business models and ecosystems. Large P&C core system vendors like Guidewire met these rapidly evolving needs by acquiring new solutions, layering new capabilities, and moving to a new deployment model (the cloud).

Missed Opportunities

Today, implementing a platform like Guidewire will provide an insurer with an incredible range of capabilities...but only when the platform is complete and fully deployed. The changes, enhancements and acquisitions Guidewire made over the past decade enable the platform to support an expansive set of needs, but they made implementations even more complex, expensive, and time-consuming. So much so that Guidewire gained a high cost, long implementation reputation.3

Many leaders at large insurance carriers now face a tough dilemma — what do they do when the finish line for their platform implementation is years away, but they have a new market opening that must be pursued yesterday? Or an immediate opportunity for cost savings through modernization within a specific LOB? New market opportunities are fleeting. Every day of operating inefficiently wastes valuable resources. Insurance leaders need the ability to spin up new core system capabilities, adjust, and (if unsuccessful) spin them down as they pursue opportunities for growth and optimization.

The Multi-Core Approach

So, that might lead you to ask – how do you build out complex, strategic capabilities that are needed for the long term and retain flexibility to pursue short-term opportunities — all within a single platform? At BriteCore, we don’t think you should.

Large insurers require a range of system capabilities along a broad continuum

As the size and scope of the business expands, essential requirements will often exceed the capabilities of the even broadest, most compelling core platforms. Even when there is an initial match of requirements and systems capabilities, new requirements can (and often do) emerge that fall outside the scope of what a vendor can support.

At one end of the continuum, large insurers must support primary LOBs that have complex requirements and demand systems with deep business functionality, sophisticated processing, and the ability to scale to high (often extremely high) transaction volumes. Some insurers have described these systems as their flagship or aircraft carrier.

At the other end of the continuum, insurers must be able to rapidly experiment with new LOBs and innovative, non-traditional business models. They require low-cost platforms that can be deployed with lightning speed and easily integrate with other systems. Instead of a large, capable (expensive) flagship, they need a system that is quick, nimble, and cost-effective — a speedboat.

One system can’t do it all.

The Benefit of BriteCore

Insurance software that's there when you need it

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BriteCore is Your Speedboat

Legacy modernization for large carriers is incredibly challenging and time consuming. It is complicated by the rapid pace of change and evolving requirements. This creates divergent needs that are simply too much for any one system to address.

Instead of a one-system-for-all approach, large insurers should embrace a multicore approach that aligns various core platforms with their divergent needs. BriteCore is perfectly positioned to support large insurers in need of a simple, cost-effective solution that can be a flexible, speedy platform for pursuing innovation and new market opportunities.