Wawanesa unlocks agility and boosts time to market for rapid product innovation

A platform for growth

Wawanesa Insurance is a Canadian mutual insurance company that provides auto, home, farm, commercial, and life insurance. The company is one of the largest insurers in Canada, with an annual revenue of $4 billion, nearly $12 billion in assets and 1.6 million members in Canada.

When Wawanesa made the decision to transform its legacy platform to Guidewire, the goal being to reduce manual operations and improve time-to-market while modernizing the user interface and introducing more user-friendly navigation. This meant re-platforming the company’s entire P&C business through a multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-line, and multi-location core transformation.

To deliver this transformation successfully, Wawanesa needed an exceptional partner with market-leading Guidewire capabilities and substantial experience with implementation, management, and platform testing. In addition, this partner would need a diverse team of experts to support the automation of processes and added platform optimization expertise. This led the company to select Capgemini, whose transformation experience and pre-existing partnership with Wawanesa gave executives the confidence to move forward with the transformation.

From assessment to acceleration

Wawanesa’s Guidewire transformation journey had begun in 2009. By 2017, the company was already benefiting from Guidewire but wanted to speed and scale up the full transformation, which would require a complex, parallel implementation across all business lines.

To start the transformation with a full view of Wawanesa’s situation, Capgemini began with a thorough analysis to properly plan and configure the process. The core platform transformation included program management, testing, implementation, and creating documentation for the entire process. This support helped Wawanesa cut the transformation time from over five years to just two and a half.

When the transformation was complete, Wawanesa and Capgemini coordinated once again to migrate the company’s Guidewire platform to the cloud, ensuring quality and efficiency with comprehensive testing at every stage.

Charting new frontiers with Guidewire

Wawanesa’s swift transition to a Guidewire platform and then to Guidewire Cloud achieved its goals of efficiency, flexibility, and superior customer experience. The company now benefits from a unified central platform making it possible for the insurer to implement further improvements.

Today, Wawanesa provides more efficient service offers and quote processing, which deliver a higher level of broker and customer satisfaction. The insurer is also able to provide cohesive interactions no matter from which P&C business line it is working.

For Wawanesa, offering a differentiated experience based on the latest technological trends is an important part of what defines its business culture. With increased efficiency, streamlined processes, and data security, the company offers its customers the highest quality of service.

Wawanesa derived deep insights into their back-office processes, enabling them to further optimize and enhance the quality of their processes and systems, paving the path to innovation. The company also gained lessons on change management processes which they are leveraging across other initiatives.