Every customer announcement is big news, and we are certainly proud of this one: GEICO, the nation’s second-largest auto insurer, is rolling out Duck Creek for policy administration and billing—for all of its personal lines of business, and across all fifty states. The carrier’s umbrella product is already in production on Duck Creek Policy, and the rest of the program, including personal auto and motorcycle insurance, is slated to follow over the coming year.
Clearly, I’m biased, but I see this is an important development for the P&C industry—not just GEICO and Duck Creek—for a number of reasons:
- It underscores the urgency of speed-to-market for insurers engaged in core systems replacement. Speed-to-market is a complex concept that touches on IT Infrastructure, regulation, pre-packaged content and flexible technology, but ultimately reflects an insurer's confidence that the vendor they partner with can deliver in the here and now.
- It indicates the power and potential of out-of-the-box, packaged solutions for carriers of all sizes–especially for those that have invested heavily in developing and maintaining a unique customer experience.
- And it illustrates the importance of the customer experience and digital transformation as a race with no end. Demonstrating its acknowledged digital-experience leadership, the preeminent carrier strives to continuously refine and improve by engaging with technology partners.
The GEICO roll out represents a broad phenomenon facing the P&C insurance industry: features and experience are only as good as your speed-to-market, not only for small and mid-size carriers, but also for the largest and most high-profile.
We believe it emphasizes that even packaged solutions now are expected to deliver agility; a real state change in an industry in which multi-year staged rollouts have historically been the norm. Consider that, Duck Creek working together with Accenture and GEICO, our combined teams got a Tier 1 industry leader live in one year.
The fact that our solution could enable the sophisticated user-experience standards of a carrier that has consistently been recognized as offering the very best mobile and web experience to insurance customers makes us doubly proud.
Ultimately, our development and engagement are driven by a desire to be best-in-class for our clients in support of these trends, and in future blog entries, we intend to speak to the above bullet points and build out some details on ways we believe they should be addressed.
Having trouble finding the right solution? Shoot me a message. I have a direct connection to one of the best core systems in the industry.
Matt Foster, Duck Creek Technologies’ Chief Operating Officer, matthew.r.foster@duckcreek.com.
