About the Customer

Basler Versicherungen are more than a traditional insurance company. Its approximately 1,500 employees focus on the wishes of their customers and sales partners. The Basler brand stands for security, simplicity and partnership. Customer-oriented service and innovative products and services make Basler the first choice for all people who simply want to feel safe.

With its head office and non-life competence centre in Bad Homburg and the life competence centre in Hamburg, Basler Versicherungen operate as a service-strong private customer insurer and as a quality-oriented provider in the corporate customer business with a high level of expertise in underwriting.

Basler Versicherungen are part of the Baloise Group, Basel (Switzerland) and had a business volume of 1.3 billion euros in 2021.

This Case Study focuses on the joint project with Basler Sachversicherungs-AG, offering a wide range of P&C Insurance products. Nevertheless, Basler Versicherungen are active in Germany in Life Insurance and Financial Services as well.

Openness to innovation and progress is one of the company’s advantages over the competition in the journey to the digital transformation.

About the Project

Basler is currently in the progress of a big IT-Transformation and successively replacing legacy systems with a new Core-System across all non-life lines of businesses. Therefore, Basler chose Guidewire as the system of choice and is implementing the whole Guidewire Insurance Suite.

Implementation of the new core systems was the first big step towards digital process efficiency. Basler, supported by Sollers Consulting professionals, has implemented the entire suite – Guidewire’s PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ClaimCenter as well as ContactManager and the DataHub. The first Go-Live for Private Motor business was successful in 2021 [Source].

As a result, the insurer responds faster to market changes, integrates service partners more easily through APIs and set up its business processes more efficiently. Additionally to the complex implementation Basler managed a successful migration of policies and claims [Source]. Given its scale and results, the project is considered as one of the most remarkable Guidewire implementations in the German insurance industry.

Benefits achieved through automation

Decisions are made in milliseconds and processing-times of business processes that were carried out manually before are decreased heavily.

Through the rule-based nature of decision-making Basler increased transparency of decisions.

Processes based on clear-cut rules have reduced the error rate that comes through manual processing drastically.

Since most decisions are done automatically, Baslers Underwriters can focus on the most crucial cases and benefit from increased efficiency, resulting in lower operating costs for Basler.

Examples of Automation at Balser Versicherungen

While implementing Guidewire, Basler, with support from Sollers Consulting, is making use of the new, strong core systems using internal workflow and process engines to automate business processes. In this study examples of automation happening in- and outside of the Guidewire PolicyCenter are highlighted.

1. Underwriting Automation

Up to now Basler has almost 100 underwriting scenarios defined for 4 different products using the business rule functionality included in Guidewire PolicyCenter 10. Thereby, the insurer profits from its vast experience over the years -as Underwriters define the risks that are to be insured.

The underwriting scenarios defined enable Underwriters to focus on the most crucial cases, while day-to-day decisions are taken care of parameter-based triggers of underwriting issues as well as rule-based decision making happening in an instant. These underwriting automations cover the whole process of new policy submissions, policy changes and renewals. Hereby, all income channels of policy transactions are handled, including aggregators and third-party agents.

To assess the risk of a new policy Basler is not only using regular input data, but also using external API-Integrations for example to conduct an external credit score check. This check happens during the creation of new policies for private customers. It serves as protection against fraud and financial risks. The credit score check is already performed on submission level before issuance. If the concerning customer doesn´t have a positive credit score the policy is not issued and necessary changes to the coverage (e.g. limited coverage amounts) are demanded by the system.

Underwriting issues that need individual and human care are automatically distributed between various underwriting authorities, without the need of reassignment. They are distributed depending on the person issuing the transaction, the transaction itself or dependent on the issue itself – the person who can handle such issues receives an activity.

2. Handling of Cancellations

One of the most automated processes at Basler is the cancellation process. Cancellation triggers from different external and internal systems are processed automatically.

If the automated cancellation process is triggered PolicyCenter can, based on received information, decide if automated cancellation process can be run or if there needs to be an activity for customer management to check a specific case. This decision is made dependent on the origin of the trigger, status of the policy (cancelled/active etc.), cancellation reason and additional data.

Guidewire PolicyCenter recognizes which kind of transaction should be carried out based on the data received. In accordance with the information provided there can be different automated processes triggered: Policy ends at the end of current term, if already created renewals for next term are withdrawn, cancellation for already bound renewals or cancellation during a running term. Depending on the information from incoming data the actual cancellation date is chosen.

This automated process also includes checks for official cancellation deadlines. If these deadlines are exceeded the cancellation is automatically rejected and a document with this information is sent to the customer. Checks for premium adjustments made by the insurer are additionally performed. They have an influence on the cancellation deadlines and are also considered during this process.

All different possible scenarios for different products were considered during this implementation process. To goal was to automate as much as possible to relieve the workload of customer management.

Outlook to the future

As Baslers Core Systems Implementation is part of a bigger digital transformation further initiatives around the automation of business processes are planned or already in progress. An example would be the Automation of data Input and data enrichment to further improve processes. That includes decision making and workflow processing inside the core system as well as outside of it with the use of BPMS.

In addition, the automation of more complex cases using ML/AI capabilities is in planning and will take the non-life transformation of the Basler Versicherungen to the next level.

Summary

During a big core system implementation, the Basler Versicherungen are doing an incredible job to not only stay close to the out-of-the box system, but to simultaneously use its functionalities for great effects. Thanks to the lean organization and agile mindset that the Basler Versicherungen adapted they managed and will continue to manage a very complex implementation with a successful Go-Live for the first Products.