(Photo credit: AWWE83.)

Guidewire Software has announced its agreement to acquire EagleEye Analytics, a Columbia, S.C.-based provider of SaaS-based predictive analytics products for Property/Casualty insurers. With the acquisition, Guidewire will support the complete predictive analytics process including data preparation, model building, operational deployment, performance monitoring, and analytic feedback, and will enable its customer to apply predictive analytics across the insurance lifecycle to power decision-making.

The acquiring company will rename EagleEye’s products Guidewire Predictive Analytics, which will be available as part of Guidewire’s Data and Analytics product family. Two predictive analytics products will be available, Guidewire reports:

• Guidewire Predictive Analytics for Claimsaddresses claims management decisions such as claim severity potential, claim routing and assignment, and identifying claims with litigation/subrogation potential.
• Guidewire Predictive Analytics for Profitabilityaddresses underwriting and distribution objectives such as accurate ratemaking and risk selection, underwriting cost reduction, maximizing customer lifetime value, and portfolio optimization.

The Guidewire/EagleEye transaction is the 18^th major insurance technology M&A deal of the year, according to Donald Light, Director, North America Property/Casualty Insurance Practice, Celent (Boston). “Guidewire’s acquisition of EagleEye Analytics reinforces one of the primary trends driving insurers and their technology solution providers: the need to create actionable findings through the application of analytics to ever increasing amount of data,” Light comments. “EagleEye rounds out Guidewire’s data and analytic suite of solutions, built on its acquisition of Millbrook in 2013, and now including DataHub, InfoCenter, and Guidewire Live.”

The newly renamed Guidewire Predictive Analytics, will focus on claims, underwriting, and pricing, “because that’s where the money is,” Light notes.

Guidewire CEO Marcus Ryu comments that the EagleEye team’s expertise in P&C processes and data science will advance Guidewire’s mission of enabling insurers to adapt and succeed in a time of significant change. “Their products, as with the others built by our Data and Analytics team, will leverage and further differentiate the capabilities of Guidewire’s insurance platform, the most broadly adopted in the industry,” Ryu says.

“We are excited about how this acquisition will enable us to serve our customers,” adds Neil Betteridge, VP, Strategy, Guidewire Software. “Adding advanced Property/Casualty predictive analytics functionality to our Data and Analytics products will enable carriers to make significantly better, faster decisions, leading to better outcomes for insurers and their policyholders.”

Comprehensive Predictive Analytics System

“This is a very exciting day for the EagleEye team. As a leader in providing predictive analytics for Property/Casualty insurance we see the fit with Guidewire as ideal,” comments Wade Bontrager, CEO, EagleEye Analytics and incoming vice president, Predictive Analytics, Guidewire Software. “We look forward to accelerating our journey in providing insurers with a comprehensive predictive analytics system that spans the insurance lifecycle and doing so as part of the Guidewire team.”

EagleEye has over 30 insurance customers in North America and Europe, nine of which are also existing Guidewire customers. In addition to its headquarters in South Carolina, EagleEye has offices in London. A privately held company, EagleEye is backed by FirstMark Capital (New York).

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