Guidewire Software, a provider of flexible core systems to property/casualty insurers, announced the availability of Guidewire PolicyCenter 7.0, the latest version of its underwriting and policy administration system.

“We are very excited about the new enhancements available with PolicyCenter 7.0 and are looking forward to using them,” said Jim Bussiere, senior vice president, sales and client services, Amica Mutual Insurance Company. “We want our front-line representatives to have state-of-the-art systems to complement their already superior service efforts. PolicyCenter 7.0 provides us with the intuitive and flexible foundation we need to continually improve how we serve our customers.”

With PolicyCenter 7.0, P/C insurers can improve customer focus, underwriting performance, operational efficiency, and business agility. Areas of enhancement include:

• Customer focus: Enhanced customer centricity provides P&C insurers with the visibility to better understand their customers in order to provide more efficient, accurate service and better identify opportunities for cross- and up-selling. Insurers can view account and policy history, manage relationships between accounts, and handle complex changes.
• Underwriting excellence: PolicyCenter 7.0 provides risk analysis and underwriting performance capabilities to help increase insurer profitability. The functionality includes third-party data integration to support risk analysis, side-by-side quoting to help insurers quickly present choices to customers, and policy holds to limit or restrict policy activity to support underwriting and regulatory compliance in the event of a natural disaster or pending product change.
• Business agility: Insurers need to adapt to a changing environment and seize opportunities to improve. PolicyCenter 7.0 provides visibility, flexibility, and scalability to empower insurers to adapt and grow within their market. Users across the enterprise gain visibility into their product portfolio with a clear, concise view of their products. PolicyCenter 7.0 also provides flexibility in maintaining rates and forms. A rate table workbench with a flexible user interface and import/export support for Microsoft Excel facilitates business user creation and management of rate factor tables, which is the most common and frequent effort in maintaining rating. Additionally, forms selection rules are accessible for business users to define and maintain.
• Reinsurance: Guidewire Reinsurance Management, a new companion product to PolicyCenter, delivers the automation needed to manage ceded reinsurance processes. Reinsurance Management handles proportional as well as non-proportional treaty and facultative reinsurance agreements and helps insurers reduce risk exposure and leakage while increasing operational efficiencies.

“With its evolution to a full, modern policy administration system, PolicyCenter's rate of adoption by the market has been brisk,” said Chad Hersh, a partner in the insurance practice at research firm Novarica. “PolicyCenter 7.0 includes enhancements that round out the solution. The addition of this strong player into the market is also likely to have the effect of increasing the number of system-replacement decisions, particularly for those carriers looking at complete suites.”