CLIENT OVERVIEW

Based out of Cheshire, Connecticut, HAI Group is the leading property and casualty insurer founded by and dedicated to supporting providers of public and affordable housing. Active for nearly 40 years, its team serves more than 1,800 housing organizations across the United States, offering insurance, risk management services, housing-focused training, and housing industry research.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Since its inception, HAI Group had been operating on a homegrown core platform. While this legacy system served the insurer well for many years, as the organization grew, its technology wasn’t adapting to the evolving needs of the business

HAI Group decided that it needed to modernize its core systems to serve customers better, respond to market changes more effectively, and bring new products and enhancements to market faster. HAI Group’s leadership team devised a five-year modernization plan, starting with a data warehouse modernization project to keep business running seamlessly, even while undergoing a core systems transformation.

Since the legacy system handled not just policy administration but also claims and billing, the insurer was seeking a core platform that could handle all of these functions. HAI Group knew that quality assurance (QA) would play an integral role in the core transformation project. Along with selecting a modern core platform, the insurer prioritized identifying a QA services partner that had deep insurance industry knowledge, QA expertise, and technical experience in the chosen platform.

After a thorough assessment phase, including a targeted demo phase and a questionnaire developed with heavy involvement from internal business stakeholders, HAI Group selected OneShield as its new core system provider and GhostDraft as its new customer communications management (CCM) platform. ValueMomentum’s insurance domain expertise and its strong knowledge of OneShield’s platforms made it stand out in the selection phase for a skilled QA partner.

SOLUTION OFFERED

HAI Group and its partners took a phased approach, beginning with around 10 months of blueprinting, analyzing the insurer’s business processes and requirements and mapping them to the OneShield system to identify areas that required configuration and customization for the insurer’s specific needs. The team worked along an aggressive timeline to ensure that business needs were continuously being met and that all lines of business could be moved over to the new systems within the next few years.

“We’re excited about the technology upgrade and the improvement to our team’s internal efficiency, but for us, the most exciting thing is to be able to provide better results to our policyholders through modern systems and engagement channels,” said Bernie Odoy, HAI Group’s Chief Technology Officer.

As soon as the project moved past the requirements phase, ValueMomentum worked with HAI Group and OneShield in a sprint model, conducting functional testing and providing feedback across multiple lines of business and value streams.

ValueMomentum’s QA team played a pivotal role across the entire modernization process. The team dove into understanding the insurer’s requirements, conducting functional testing across the entire project life cycle, and assisting with user acceptance testing. The ValueMomentum team worked closely with the development teams, testing the functionality components as they were developed and starting end-to-end testing in April 2024. At every step of the modernization project, ValueMomentum’s team continues to play a critical role in the modernization effort, handling integration testing, regression testing, and testing of new features, even after golive. Any issues uncovered in production are then tested by ValueMomentum’s team in a lower environment and fixed.

The project was launched in January 2023 and went live for its first two lines of business, general liability and excess, in October 2024. Starting with two lines of business enabled HAI Group to ensure the transformation was completed successfully so that additional lines of business could be rolled out more quickly in 2025.

VALUE DELIVERED

Moving from a legacy system to a modern, cloud-based core system and CCM platform has enabled HAI Group to offer a better user experience to internal business users, leading to greater efficiency and more time to focus on specific customer needs. The platform upgrade has also paved the way for a better user experience for customers and agents and for future integration with improved user portals. In addition, early results have already shown strong improvements to HAI Group’s quoting process.. As additional lines of business are migrated to OneShield, the insurer anticipates even greater returns on investment.

“Our legacy system lasted 30 years, and we intend for the next one to last that long, too,” Odoy noted. “ValueMomentum has been committed to the project as much as our own employees have. The way they’ve become part of our core operations team is indicative of that; they’ve learned alongside our team to ensure that our new platform is consistently performing as it needs to in order to support our policyholders effectively. This project succeeded thanks to the commitment of our team, combined with the dedication and knowledge of our partners.”