CLIENT OVERVIEW
An innovator since its founding in 1921, Illinois-based Pekin Insurance offers a portfolio of health, life, personal, and commercial lines of business. Pekin Insurance’s nearly 800 employees serve more than 900,000 policyholders in 22 states. With combined assets of over $2 billion, Pekin Insurance supports a distribution network of 800+ agencies and 8,800+ independent agents.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Pekin Insurance identified the need for expansion of its commercial lines into new territories to fuel growth and mitigate risks. Its goal: a swift, efficient expansion into Utah without compromising quality.
“To be successful, Pekin Insurance must grow and must do so profitably,” said Joel Jackson, Pekin Insurance’s SVP and COO. “State expansion is a key to both goals. As we expand our footprint, we make our products available to a larger market, naturally increasing our premium income. Additionally, the diversification of risk plays a tremendous role in our profitability.”
The insurer’s targets included five pivotal commercial lines of business (LoBs): commercial auto, business owners’ policy, workers’ compensation, commercial package policy, and commercial umbrella.
Enterprise-wide, Pekin Insurance aimed to transition its core platforms from on-premises to Guidewire Cloud to accelerate overall project delivery time and reduce the burden of future state rollouts.
SOLUTION OFFERED
Pekin Insurance first formed a project execution team comprising a program manager, R&D manager, business subject matter experts (SMEs), business analysts (BAs), an actuary, technical architects, and the release and quality leads. Team members collaborated from the outset to allow parallel development of the product model.
With this new team structure and ValueMomentum’s help, Pekin Insurance began to migrate its on-premises systems to Guidewire Cloud and adopt Guidewire’s SurePath guided implementation approach. The team first utilized pre-existing and standardized content on the Guidewire platform to streamline state requirement review and analysis.
The Actuary team then worked alongside the BAs to develop rates concurrently with the product model and forms. They further implemented Guidewire Predict, enabling them to deploy pricing models that expedited their development timeline.
The program team introduced a pre-UAT/early start of UAT with end-to-end testing conducted by the quality assurance (QA) team and SMEs. The QA team was able to test functionalities simultaneously while identifying critical defects at an early stage. Consequently, both the QA and UAT phases were significantly shortened.
Pekin Insurance’s 2023 growth metric for Utah is on track to exceed initial targets, with Q1 results greater than 50% of the company’s 2023 annual growth goal.
VALUE DELIVERED
The new execution approach, combining a cross-functional product model development with Guidewire’s SurePath methodology, expedited the Utah rollout by developing all five LoBs simultaneously. Thus, Pekin Insurance was able to complete all development work within eight months.
Pekin Insurance’s 2023 growth metric for Utah is on track to exceed initial targets, with Q1 results greater than 50% of the company’s 2023 annual growth goal.
Importantly, the insurer created a repeatable project execution approach for future state expansion with increased operational efficiency and cost reduction from Guidewire Cloud platform capabilities. Pekin Insurance is on track to expand into an additional state in Q2 2024, with plans to implement (at least) one state per year through 2030.
“We will still have storms that affect us,” Jackson said. “However, as we increase our geography, a single storm will have less impact on overall results.”
