(Image source: Guidewire.)
Guidewire (San Mateo, California) has announced its latest cloud release, named Hakuba, after the village in the Japanese Alps that hosted the 1998 Winter Olympic Games. This release follows Garmisch, announced in April 2023, following Aspen in June 2020, which was succeeded by the alphabetically sequenced, ski-resort referencing releases of Banff, Cortina, Dobson, Elysian and Flaine. Guidewire announced in March 2023 that it would move to an approximately 120-day release cadence, having published new releases every six months originally. The next release, Innsbruck is due before the end of 2023.
The vendor describes Hakuba as capable of enabling insurers to innovate continuously. Hakuba drives profitability for P&C insurers with the new Autopilot Workflow Service, expanded commercial lines offerings, and enhancements across the Guidewire platform, applications, and content, according to Guidewire’s announcement of the new release.
Guidewire describes highlights of Hakuba as follows:
Autopilot Workflow Service (Early Access): Improve process agility by orchestrating automation across the P&C insurance lifecycle. A powerful new cloud service empowers technical and non-technical users to accelerate automation with low-code tooling and out-of-the-box integrations to InsuranceSuite APIs and third-party services. Business process logic is externalized from InsuranceSuite, allowing insurers to reduce downtime. The Autopilot Workflow Service is available as early access for claims automation.
Integration Data Manager: Simplify data management and improve governance with a new way to store and use third-party data such as fraud assessments, credit reports, property flood reports, and motor vehicle reports with InsuranceSuite. Third-party data is stored externally and displayed in InsuranceSuite for use with business rules without having to extend the InsuranceSuite data model. Integration Data Manager ensures integrity as third-party and InsuranceSuite data are kept separate and streamlines the developer experience by retrieving third-party data using the Integration Gateway and creating pools of data for specific purposes.
Rating App (Early Access): Accelerate speed to market with a new externalized cloud microservice for deploying rates and integration with PolicyCenter and BillingCenter. The Rating App reimagines the rating process with agility, speed, and a new user experience. Rate developers and actuaries can create and change rates quickly and easily with the ability to re-use and share individually versioned rating artifacts.
London Market Journal Financials: Empower underwriters with a complete picture of the financials for their London Market policies within PolicyCenter. A new view called Journal Financials provides both summary and granular, transaction-level views of bound policies. The view includes information such as agreed and settled premium, deferred acquisition costs, and earnings.
Cyence Model 6: Empower underwriters to make confident decisions with the most current view of cyber risk from Cyence Model 6. The cyber risk landscape is constantly changing with new threats such as multi-prong ransomware attacks and data breaches. To keep up with the latest cyber risk trends and threats, Model 6 adds new and updated cyber risk data from more than 900 sources including the latest cyber incidents and claims. The event models are retooled to generate more accurate insights. Model 6 is more advanced in predicting ransomware attacks, data breaches, business interruptions, and modeled losses than Model 5.
Guidewire has produced a Hakuba Release Highlights video to provide more information about the latest releasse. The Hakuba web page also has comprehensive details of the release, such as additional new features and videos.