Duck Creek Technologies has announced that Utah-based Bear River Mutual Insurance has selected the Duck Creek Suite for its digital transformation. Bear River Mutual will utilize Duck Creek Policy, Rating, Billing, Claims and Insights to replace systems acquired from multiple vendors. Bear River Mutual will utilize the products through Duck Creek OnDemand, Duck Creek’s software-as-a-service (Saas) platform for the property-casualty industry.
The insurer’s core-systems replacement initiative was driven by concerns that portions of its system would limit its ability to compete in the market. Bear River Mutual faced numerous challenges in getting multiple claims, policy and billing systems to work in concert, Duck Creek said. The problem was compounded by the high cost of upgrades. To alleviate these issues, the insurer elected to switch to a suite of tightly integrated core systems. The company chose Duck Creek OnDemand to ensure seamless upgrades.
“The key trend of cloud-based core system-building has continued to strengthen over the past year, with 75% of insurers making similar decisions,” said Karen Furtado, partner at Strategy Meets Action. “Insurers that are turning to cloud-based applications such as Duck Creek OnDemand are looking to improve their speed of implementation, lessen the complexity of maintenance, and focus their efforts on differentiating products and services they bring to market.”
“Having replaced our core systems and developed custom portals for our agents and customers over the last 10 years, we learned quite a bit about what drives value in the core and where we should be focusing our resources,” said Brian Long, vice president of IT for Bear River Mutual. “We knew that we needed to make a change, and that SaaS was a critical requirement. The largest takeaways from our experience are that on-premises solutions result in taking on significant technical debt in order to leverage connected services; the resource requirement for routine maintenance and upgrades is a continual drag on carrier innovation, and some vendors have gates to features and functions at the expense of the carrier having to take on significant complexity as opposed to fully baked solutions. … Of the 16 vendors and 18 solutions we explored, we believe the Duck Creek Suite OnDemand is the most comprehensive answer to these issues. In many cases, the separation between Duck Creek and other solutions was substantial.”
“This core-systems replacement represents a significant shift for Bear River Mutual and is yet another signal that the market is moving firmly away from on-premises applications to SaaS,” said Andy Dey, chief product and technology officer at Duck Creek. “Duck Creek OnDemand will let Bear River Mutual focus on the right challenges – growing its book of business and building the new products and customer experiences their policyholders expect, while our team handles day-to-day IT operations and application upgrades for them behind the scenes. We are happy to welcome Bear River Mutual to the Duck Creek family and look forward to helping them continue to grow and succeed.”
