In this video, Loraine Lester, VP of Product and Underwriting Management at Farmers of Salem (a mutual insurer based in Wilmington, Delaware), shares how her team uses the Finys Suite across core operations—including claims processing, billing, reporting, and business intelligence. She highlights how Design Studio empowers both business users and her development team to manage rate tables, underwriting rules, and form configurations in-house, enabling faster updates and quicker responses to shifting Mid-Atlantic market conditions. Loraine also emphasizes Finys’ strong partnership and responsiveness—helping Farmers of Salem accelerate deployments and maintain critical speed to market.
About Farmers of Salem
Farmers of Salem is a regional mutual insurance company specializing in insurance for home and business owners. Owned by its policyholders, not stockholders, Farmers of Salem is focused on servicing its insureds’ needs.
Full Transcript:
I am Loraine Lester. I’m from Farmers of Salem. I’m the VP of Product and Underwriting Management. I oversee the product side as well as the underwriting side. I kind of sit between both worlds at our company. I oversee the Finys Suite for Farmers of Salem. Farmers of Salem is a mutual insurance company located in Wilmington, Delaware. We operate in four states in the Mid-Atlantic region: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Being a mutual, we’re owned by our policyholders, and we work through the independent agency network to sell our products. So Farmers of Salem uses the Finys Suite to process our claims. Our policyholders use it for the billing system. We use the business intelligence side of it and the reporting side of it. We use the Design Studio intensely. There is a developer on my team who uses Design Studio as well as myself.
We do all of our work there. We do all the rate changes, we do the rate tables, the underwriting rules, the form configurations, all of that is in that design studio. It’s a very powerful tool for us. I find it very helpful for us. Our prior system took time to get things out, and in the rapidly changing market that we’re in in the Mid-Atlantic region, it’s very beneficial for us. We can get our rate adjustments in, and we can respond to the market quickly. We work with our underwriting department, we work with the development department that I oversee, and we get the changes they need in a good, quick spell so that they can react to the market conditions that we’ve been experiencing in the last three, four years. Design Studio is an extremely powerful tool for Farmers of Salem. I’ve never worked with a policy admin system that has such a powerful tool for the business users to use at Farmers of Salem. We’ve had a great experience working with the Finys team, a very responsive team. I have something come up from a user or one of our agents, and I feel I could pick up the phone to anybody, and they can get an issue resolved very quickly for me. And then, as well as just our normal deploys and product integrations and improvements, we get through rather quickly with Finys, and the speed to market is essential for us.
