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It’s been a good year so far for Guidewire Software and its performance in the Canadian market. While the company has been active on this side of the border since 2005 and counts over 20 Canadian insurers as customers that are running their P&C business using Guidewire platforms, 2017 was especially active, according to the company’s vice president of strategy.
“Since 2017, we’ve added four more insurers to our customer base and we’ve started to see more insurers in the under $200 million in written premiums [range] adopting Guidewire,” said Neil Betteridge. “When we look at that, we see that the significant experience the understanding of the Canadian market we’ve built up over more than a decade serving the Canadian insurers is allowing a few things. It’s helping us implement with meeting Canadian-specific needs much more quickly, it’s reducing the cost of ownership for those carriers, and also seeing more interest and adoption of solutions running on the cloud by insurers in Canada.”
Brokerages in Canada are also performing well in terms of their adoption of Guidewire’s solutions – in fact, the country stands out, says Betteridge, who told Insurance Business that, as a Canadian, he’s happy to report that his home country has the strongest level of market adoption across all of Guidewire’s 30-plus countries.
“We see strong appetite for technology transformation and innovation in Canada,” he said. “Maybe the UK would be the one market where we see people even more aggressive and ahead, but I think in Canada, because it’s a smaller insurance community, people see more quickly what choices others are making, what moves they’re making to better serve their brokers and customers, and I think that’s helped drive momentum for Guidewire.”
It took some time for the software company to build up those capabilities unique to the Canadian marketplace that have made it successful, but its partner ecosystem is now well-developed.
“We’ve got a good range of broker integration, working with Applied in Canada, Vertafore’s Keal division,” said Betteridge, adding that there’s also Canadian-specific underwriting and regulatory solutions, the latter of which is a result of Guidewire’s partnership with Hubio. “As we’ve built more of those relationships, pre-integrated them with our platforms, it makes it easier for more carriers to move on to Guidewire, and it makes it easier for them to quickly and cost-efficiently provide services that their customers are looking for.”
The recent innovation in Canada that’s caught the VP’s attention has been the move to digital direct. Economical, one of Guidewire’s clients, made a splash with the launch of Sonnet a few years ago and, again now, with the release of its broker-focused solution, Vyne.
“This is an area that Canada actually leads – our insurers are not leaving their broker partners behind,” explained Betteridge, adding that, similarly, Wawanesa Mutual Insurance, following on the launch of its Guidewire-powered InsuranceSuite in Alberta, will continue to roll it out across the country, and is putting strong platforms in place that make it easy for the brokers to do business with them.
Coming up, Betteridge expects that the cloud will continue to hold an important place in the way insurance companies do business.
“Canada’s actually been one of the strongest adopters of our cloud-based analytics solutions, Guidewire Live,” he said. The company has seen good interest in the utilization of predictive analytics and AI-driven models, and weaving them right into the carriers’ core underwriting processes and core claims handling.
“Expect to see more adoption of our customers taking Guidewire’s cloud-based solutions. Currently, everything that we have is available on the cloud and we’ve seen a real leap in the last year to 18 months and shift in carriers’ attitudes from having been somewhat cautious about moving their core systems to the cloud to now showing much more willingness and interest in engaging that model and delivery with us.”
