Looking to Increase Bottom Line in Soft Market?

For over 16 years, MGA's and carriers have trusted QualCorp for their Rating and Policy Issuance Software.

Their flagship product - FormsPlus - automates all lines of business for both admitted and non-admitted business. FormsPlus can be scaled for any business model from startups to global programs.

QualCorp and their partners provide:

* Web or desktop versions;

* Statistical data for upload and reporting;

* True "Hands Free" rating & policy issuance with one click of the mouse;

* Policy distribution based around the customer’s business rules, which eliminate or reduce cost to print/collate/mail;

* Policy lifecycle processing that includes quotes, new business, endorsements, cancellation, and renewal transactions;

Let QualCorp help you determine what your return on investment will be.

Call (888) 367-6775 ext (2428) or email: products@qualcorp.com or visit www.qualcorp.com for further information.

Guidewire Unveils ClaimCenter 5.0

At the 2008 ACORD/LOMA Conference, Guidewire Software^® Inc., a global provider of solutions to property and casualty insurers, announced the release of Guidewire ClaimCenter^®– the latest version of the market-leading claims system for property and casualty (P&C) insurers.

More than 40 carriers of all sizes and lines of business around the world rely on Guidewire ClaimCenter - a complete, 100% web-based claims system - to handle their mission-critical core claims management operations. ClaimCenter enables carriers to improve their claims adjusting processes, reduce claims costs, and enhance customer service.

Building on ClaimCenter’s leadership in the market, ClaimCenter 5.0 delivers more than 25 major enhancements to a product that is already widely regarded as being the best claims system available to insurers. The latest version of ClaimCenter enables Guidewire’s customers to further improve their claims operations in the following ways:

• Improve efficiency throughout the claims lifecycle, with better claim intake screens and better management of damage and repair assessments;
• Improved usability for claims adjusters, supervisors and all end-users with new user interface;
• Measure quality of service providers with new service provider management functionality;
• Further reduce fraud and “leakage” with new fraud scoring capability;
• Lower costs with addition of subrogation lifecycle functionality; and
• Improve ability for IT to respond to system change requests with new graphical configuration tools – including “drag and drop” functionality.

“As ClaimCenter’s first in-production customer (late 2003), we can certainly attest to the comprehensive functionality benefits and overall business transforming capabilities ClaimCenter provides,” says Robert Eshelbrenner, vice president, chief information officer, Hastings Mutual Insurance Company. “We have been very impressed with ClaimCenter’s evolution from a new claims system into the market leading one in such a short amount of time. We attribute this to Guidewire’s unrelenting focus on the needs of the P&C insurance market and the success of their customers, their software development strength, and their unwavering commitment to quality.”

Donald Light, Senior Analyst in Celent’s insurance group, commented, “ClaimCenter 5.0 represents a very good response to what insurers are looking for in a modern claim system: agility based on a high degree of configurability, ease of use, and consistency in processes and decisions."

“Any software company can claim that their offerings deliver sustainable value, but seeing is believing,” says Bill Garvey, a director of information technology at The Main Street America Group, a super regional property/casualty company. “Our claims system replacement project deployed in multiple phases to successive lines of business, reaching full deployment in early 2008. We are upgrading to ClaimCenter 5.0 to leverage the functionality enhancements Guidewire has made and to ensure that our technology investment continues to provide maximum value to our organization and our customers.”

Guidewire ClaimCenter provides extensive support for the end-to-end claim process. ClaimCenter 5.0 further extends this support to include:

• Enhanced First Notice of Loss – streamlined, faster and more efficient claim intake process;
• Score-based service provide management – fully flexible performance scoring to track vendor performance;
• New Assessments Module – managing appraisals from internal and/or external sources with detailed line-item tracking capabilities;
• Enhanced fraud detection – provision for both “dynamic question” and “rules based” scoring to assist in the early detection of fraudulent claims;
• New Subrogation module - providing full management of the claims subrogation lifecycle;
• New international capabilities - multi-currency transactions (including reserves and payments), multi-country geographic definitions and assignment and Unicode support;
• Enhanced catastrophe management – enhanced CAT data element capture for proactive and retroactive detection of claims that should be CAT coded;
• Automated claim archiving with real-time, on-demand restore - transparent end-user search for archived /non-archived claims with on demand, real-time restoration ability;
• New User Interface (UI) – completely new user interface designed to improve ease of use for all end users; and
• New graphical configuration tools – drag and drop configuration functionality to simplify the configuration process and improve implementation speed.

“Direct input from Guidewire customers guides how we develop and evolve our products,” said Ken Branson, vice president, product development, Guidewire Software. “ClaimCenter 5.0 delivers many new enhancements to provide the additional in-depth functionality, ease of configuration, and system flexibility that modern P&C insurers require to refine their operations. Our innovative software development methodologies ensure that we are able to quickly deliver the highest quality product to the industry.”

The Main Street America Group Using Guidewire

Guidewire Software®, a global provider of solutions to property and casualty insurers, announced that The Main Street America Group, a super regional property and casualty carrier, has fully completed its deployment of Guidewire ClaimCenter® for all its lines of business.

ClaimCenter completely replaces Main Street America’s three legacy claims systems. This milestone marks the first of several core system replacements at Main Street America and is the culmination of a three-year phased deployment effort.

Like most insurers, Main Street America was using a variety of systems of various ages to meet its claims handling needs. The company reportedly recognized the numerous benefits and sustainable competitive advantage modern technology systems could provide and committed to modernizing its core claims system.

Facing system replacement and internal build challenges in the ensuing years, Main Street America selected Guidewire ClaimCenter as its system of choice in mid-2005. Main Street America has since been focused on its replacement project, methodically deploying ClaimCenter for successive lines of business in 2006 and 2007, with the final line of business moving into production during February 2008.

This ClaimCenter project deployed as planned and on-budget and included 26 integration points to key Main Street America systems, including several policy administration systems, check disbursement, statistics engine, accounting systems, the company’s data warehouse and to relevant external systems.

ClaimCenter provides Main Street America with a more streamlined and flexible claim processing environment, the ability to provide enhanced policyholder services, and improved operational efficiencies that will reportedly lead to reduced claim loss expenses and positively impact the carrier’s combined ratio.

Guidewire ClaimCenter is a leading end-to-end claims system for property and casualty insurance companies. ClaimCenter’s flexible business rules enable claims organizations to optimize and monitor the claims process. Claims executives can define, enforce, and continually refine their preferred claim handling practices. In addition, a modern technology architecture, providing 100% web client, and web services interface enable lower total cost of ownership in any environment.