Guidewire HazardHub Replaces Per-Carrier SFTP Accounts With Files.com Share Links

Guidewire is a software platform provider to the property and casualty insurance industry. Alongside its core systems, it sells data and analytics products that feed underwriting and pricing decisions. One of those is HazardHub, a property-risk data business Guidewire acquired in 2021. HazardHub scores risks for properties across the United States, from wildfire and flood to local fire suppression.

Carriers consume those risk scores two ways. An API returns a risk profile for a single property. The other way is batch: a carrier sends a whole book of properties at once, HazardHub’s solutions architects run it through the risk models, and the scored results come back as a file. The API is an integration. The batch business is a file exchange, and every run of it means a CSV carrying thousands of properties crossing from one company to another, and a results file crossing back.

Batch Files by Email and an SFTP Account for Every New Carrier

Some carriers sent property files as email attachments. For customers using the formal batch channel, every newly signed customer was issued an SFTP account, with instructions to send batch requests through it.

That model traded one problem for another. Insurance carriers vary enormously in technical capability, and many of the ones sending batches have no transfer tooling and nobody on staff who works with SFTP. Every new contract therefore opened with a provisioning exercise on Guidewire’s side and a support exercise on the carrier’s. And batch runs are not only production work. The same runs serve as proof-of-value exercises used to win carriers that have not signed yet, which meant the first thing a prospective carrier experienced was being handed an SFTP credential and asked to figure it out. Friction in the exchange channel was friction in the sales motion itself.

The shape of the workload made a per-customer credential an especially heavy answer. A core of long-term carriers runs the same cycle every month, but a long tail makes one or two requests ever, and a permanent account is a lot of ceremony for a single file. The data argued the same way: nothing is retained. A batch is received, processed, returned, and deleted. The channel had to be secure and disposable at the same time, and an issued credential was not disposable.

A Per-Client Folder and a Password-Protected Share Link

As the customer base grew, HazardHub needed one channel that could carry a monthly production cycle and a one-off pre-sales run alike. It had to work in a browser for a carrier with nothing installed, keep every client’s traffic in its own space, record which client each access path belonged to, and leave nothing behind once a run was returned. HazardHub made Files.com that channel, so proof-of-value runs and monthly production cycles could use the same exchange.

The exchange was built as one client-facing structure with a folder per client, and the folder became the unit everything else hung on.

Each password-protected Files.com Share Link pointed to a client’s folder and carried an internal comment identifying the batch request it served. A carrier needed a browser and a password, nothing more. Long-term clients kept a stable link and ran their monthly cycle against it, while an ad hoc request or proof-of-value run got a link cut for that request. Carriers with transfer infrastructure were not forced into the browser: SFTP with per-user SSH keys reached the same folders, a second door into the same exchange.

Internally, the Solutions Architecture team and other client-facing Guidewire teams worked in those client folders under group-based roles. Access stayed scoped to the appropriate client area, so a batch never needed a second copy circulating through internal channels.

The workload that resulted was pure transit. A carrier dropped a CSV through its link or over SFTP, solutions architects pulled it and ran the models, the result file went back through the same channel, and the files were deleted. The site held almost nothing at rest against a far larger monthly transfer volume.

“You guys aren’t just like, oh, here’s the site. You’re willing to get on with us and work with us to help rationalize our workflow and make everything fit right.”

Scored Results Back in a Day, With Nothing Left Behind

With the exchange in production on Files.com, HazardHub replaced per-carrier SFTP provisioning with one repeatable pattern that serves production customers and prospects alike.

• A batch turns around in no more than a day end to end. The carrier sends the file and the run parameters, the team runs the models, and the scored results go back through the same link.
• Onboarding a new batch customer is a folder and a password-protected link. There is no SFTP account to provision, no credential to walk a carrier through, and nothing for the carrier to install.
• Roughly ten long-standing carrier contracts exchange files monthly through stable links, with a longer tail of ad hoc and proof-of-value runs riding the same channel, and individual submissions carry thousands of property reports each.
• Nothing accumulates. Files are received, processed, returned, and deleted, so the exchange never builds a standing store of carrier data that has to be defended.

The compounding effect sits underneath those. Because a proof-of-value run needs no more setup than a production cycle, the sales motion uses the same channel as the delivery motion. Winning a new carrier and serving a long-standing one are the same operation: a folder, a link, a file in, results back.

Signing a Carrier No Longer Starts With Credentials

The lesson travels well beyond insurance. Production batch delivery to non-technical B2B counterparties does not require putting a credential in every customer’s hands. Files.com carries HazardHub’s exchange on documented, password-protected links, with SFTP still there for the carriers that want it, and the result is a channel exactly as disposable as the data moving through it.