BillingCenter

Matt Hamilton, Senior Product Manager – BillingCenter

Across the industry, carriers are searching for ways to enhance operational performance, increase customer retention and improve the bottom line. The billing process, traditionally characterized by manually-intensive work and the use of rigid, antiquated systems, offers an untapped opportunity to meet these goals through enhanced customer service and business flexibility. Guidewire BillingCenter®, a web-based billing system that coordinates, executes, records and tracks receivables transactions for Property and Casualty (P&C) and workers’ compensation carriers, helps insurers to realize these benefits.

Key Features Flexibility to design billing, payment, and delin-quency plans that meet the needs of your customers and agents

Automated billing lifecycle from initial billing instruction through collections and renewals with robust, integrated workflow

Calculation of agent commissions according to defined commission plans

Automated exception handling processes via workflow steps

Ability to interface with external payment systems – EFT, EBPP, check writing, payroll deduction, etc.

Detailed history of account information, policy information, payments, and transactions in a single console

Validations and business rules ensure accuracy of information

“Trouble Tickets” offer a centralized way to manage and track open issues with policyholders

Support for account-level and policy-level billing

Support for agency bill and direct bill plans

Support for equity dating and continuous bill plans

Benefits Increase productivity of customer service and billing departments with automated billing processes and exception handling

Reduce uncollected earned premium with bill-ing plans that optimize customer equity

Reduce write-offs by managing collections to receive timely payment

Manage cash strategically through predictable and manageable receipts

Deliver superior customer service through real-time access to information

Increase customer retention with optimized billing and payment plans

Improve agent relationships through the automation of commissions calculation and payment

Reduce billing system maintenance costs

Insurers have long understood that bill-ing processes have a significant impact on the bottom line. The inability to ac-curately and efficiently produce a bill and collect premiums due in a timely manner adds to an insurer’s expense, can con-tribute to uncollected earned premium and will negatively impact an insurer’s combined ratio.

And insurers are beginning to realize that billing is much more than a financial process – it is also a critical measurement of an insurer’s customer service. Billing is the only way that insurers communicate with their customers on a regular basis. In fact, billing issues are the primary reason customers call their insurers. Dis-satisfaction with billing and poor claims handling are the top two factors that im-pact an insurer’s customer retention rate.

Insurers increasingly seek to improve the billing experience for customers but this is not easily achieved with existing legacy

billing systems. These systems simply do not offer the functionality and flexibility required to meet insurer requirements and customer demands. Guidewire BillingCenter, built on the same platform as Guidewire ClaimCenter – the market leading modern claims system – and Guidewire PolicyCenter – a next genera-tion underwriting and policy adminis-tration system – is the first web-based billing system built specifically to meet these needs. This flexible, scalable solu-tion is built entirely on modern technolo-gy and provides insurers the opportunity to raise customer service levels while increasing billing process efficiencies, and ultimately improving bottom-line results. Guidewire BillingCenter was de-signed as a standalone product that can interface to any third party system or can be implemented as part of the Guidewire Insurance Suite™.

PROPERTY AND CASUALTY BILLING

TODAY’S CHALLENGE

SupervisorsCustomer ServiceRepresentatives Underwriters Premium Auditors AgentsBilling ClerksExecutives

Administration

Configuration

Rules Engine

Security

Contacts

Integration

GuidewireInsurance SuitePlatform

ProducerManagement

Double-Entry Accounting Core

CollectionsDelinquencyManagement

ReceivablesManagement

InvoiceManagement

BillingProcessManagement

PortalUserExperience

Billing Desktop

Firewall

100% Java/J2EE

100% web client for end users

Clustering for scalability to thousands of con-current users

SOA-ready integration

Completely configurable using Guidewire Studio, XML and business rules

Upgrade-safe configuration

More than 12,500 automated tests

Guidewire BillingCenter includes six major functional components together supporting the end-to-end billing process.

All components are built on a common, modern software platform, providing consistent mechanisms for configuring functionality and workflow, managing security, and administering the system.

ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW

Guidewire BillingCenter was designed and built on an all-modern architecture for maximum flexibility and performance. The sys-tem is written in Java for the J2EE standard and runs on multiple industry-leading platforms. Clustering ensures high performance and horizontal scalability.

BillingCenter provides an extensive set of screens and business rules to run out-of-the-box, and the system can be tailored to the needs of any insurer. The data model, screens, and business rules are managed in XML or in the graphical Guidewire Studio™ envi-ronment for ease of configuration. All configuration changes are rigorously partitioned from source code to preserve a customer upgrade path delivering major functional enhancements with streamlined implementation.

Unlike most legacy systems, BillingCenter was designed from the ground up for SOA to facilitate integration into complex IT environments. In addition to providing native Web services-based integration to Guidewire ClaimCenter®, and Guidewire PolicyCenter®, the Guidewire Insurance Suite’s integration layer has been proven under numerous integration scenarios with third-party systems, from batch file transfer to real-time synchro-nization with mainframe systems.

For these reasons and more, customers have chosen Guidewire BillingCenter as the backbone of their billing department in sup-port of multiple lines of business.

TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE

Guidewire World Headquarters:2211 Bridgepointe Parkway, Suite 200San Mateo, CA 94404 USAPhone: + 1 650 357 9100Fax: +1 650 357 9101Email: info@guidewire.comwww.guidewire.com

© 2009 Guidewire Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Guidewire, Guidewire Software, Guidewire ClaimCenter, Guidewire PolicyCenter, Guidewire BillingCenter, Guidewire Insurance Suite, and the Guidewire logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Guidewire Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. BR-BC-0509

Guidewire Software is a leading global provider of technology solutions to property and casualty and workers’ compensation insurers. Guidewire delivers proven software to run core insurance operations, including billing, underwriting, policy, and claim management. The Guidewire Insurance Suite™ consists of Guidewire ClaimCenter®, Guidewire PolicyCenter®, and Guidewire BillingCenter®, which provide a modern, web-based platform for all lines of business. Guidewire is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with offices in London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, and Tokyo.

Increasingly, practitioners are recognizing the impact of the billing experience on customer satisfaction and renewal rates. If customers have a question about an invoice or worse, believe that they have been improperly billed, they expect prompt answers from their insur-er. However, the customer service representa-tives they call often have difficulty locating the source of the problem, much less identifying the solution.

Guidewire BillingCenter enables the delivery of superior customer service by offering a 360 degree view of account-level and policy-level billing information. Information about invoic-es generated, payments received, and amounts outstanding is immediately available through a single console and the accuracy of infor-mation is ensured by business rules. When customer discrepancies cannot be immediately resolved, Guidewire BillingCenter allows cus-tomer service representatives to create trouble tickets and define which activities – invoic-ing, delinquency, collections, etc. – should be suspended until the issue is resolved.

In addition, Guidewire BillingCenter offers unmatched flexibility to define and implement billing plans that meet the needs of customers while facilitating renewals. With Guidewire BillingCenter, carriers can create billing plans that standardize payments throughout the billing cycle. For example, a continuous bill plan that collects consistent payments at even intervals throughout the policy period avoids billing spikes at the time of policy renewal. Guidewire BillingCenter also supports ac-count billing so that an insured receives and pays a single bill for each billing period even if they hold multiple policies with a carrier. This single bill helps to minimize the impact of a policy renewal since spikes in premium can be allocated across multiple policies.

Billing departments play a pivotal role in en-suring a carrier’s bottom-line results. They are responsible for accurately invoicing custom-ers and expediting payment processing while balancing the needs of customers with the needs of the business. Legacy billing systems offer only minimal support for these goals, resulting in delayed payments, uncollected earned premium, and potentially write-offs. Guidewire BillingCenter can help carriers to improve business results in a few key ways.

With Guidewire BillingCenter, carriers can design billing plans that minimize uncollected earned premium exposure. For example, an “equity dating” strategy can be applied to a billing plan to ensure enough pre-paid cover-age that a carrier will not incur uncollected earned premium should an insured stop paying their premium. Under this plan, if an account falls into delinquency and is subse-quently canceled, the insured’s equity in the policy will be zero on the date of cancellation.

Guidewire BillingCenter can also be lever-aged to minimize write-offs. Amounts due on a policy at the time of expiration can be carried forward with policy renewal to ensure that carriers continue to bill for and eventu-ally collect these amounts. In addition, with Guidewire BillingCenter, billing managers can easily generate reports to understand which policies account for write-offs and which bill-ing clerks have approved these transactions.

Finally, Guidewire BillingCenter contributes to bottom-line results by offering carriers increased control over cash management. By automating invoicing and collections pro-cesses, payment receipts become predictable. Guidewire BillingCenter offers complete vis-ibility into the status of customer accounts and automatically executes a series of pre-defined delinquency actions to speed time to payment or to cancel delinquent policies as necessary, helping carriers to minimize uncollected earned premium.

Billing departments are responsible not only for the execution of accounts receivable trans-actions, but also for the timely resolution of billing exceptions and issues. Unfortunately, the legacy systems that many insurers use do not facilitate the important work these clerks do. It’s not uncommon for a billing clerk to access three or more systems to complete a single task since account information isn’t maintained in a central repository. Not only does this make their work time consuming and error prone, but it often means that they have to manually reconcile discrepancies across systems before invoicing, applying payments, or sending communications to customers.

Guidewire BillingCenter is designed to man-age all of the information a billing department needs to access and provide a “single source of truth” around all of the transactions that must be executed using that information. Informa-tion about customers’ payment and billing plans, payment history, and amounts due are accessible at both the policy and the account level. Business rules allow users to model billing processes into a series of automated steps, freeing up billing clerks from manual processes to focus on more strategic initiatives.

In addition to improving business user effi-ciency, Guidewire BillingCenter also increases the efficiency of IT departments. Thanks to its modern, 100% Java architecture, Guidewire BillingCenter is easier and less expensive to maintain than a legacy billing system, and skilled resources are more readily available in the marketplace. Because configurations to the system are partitioned from core source code, upgrading to new versions to take advantage of enhanced functionality is easy and cost-effective.

IMPROVE THE BOTTOM LINEINCREASE CUSTOMER RETENTION IMPROVE EFFICIENCY

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