Digital Shortens the Distance Between Accident and Auto Claims Payouts

The auto claims payment process is ripe for a technology-led overhaul.

“There are inefficiencies and manual processes, and the processes are not yet fully connected,” Kelli Svymbersky, vice president of sales and business development for payments at CCC, told PYMNTS.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to bring digital intelligence across the entire auto claims experience.”

To get a sense of the pain points, she said, industry-wide there are over 1 billion days of lag time between when an auto claim is created and when it is closed. That means that, on average, each claim can take 50 days or more to be resolved.

“It’s important to remember that behind every claim, every repair, there’s a customer left without their vehicle,” she said. “Speed is important. Policyholders may have access to a rental, but not indefinitely.”

Many Transactions and Myriad Touchpoints

“There are hundreds of transactions and multi-party decisions that have to be made,” Svymbersky noted.

And when the claim is settled, payments are still most often issued in the form of paper checks, a manual and time-consuming process for insurers.

Digitizing Claim Payments

Insurers have made strides in improving the customer experience. Policyholders, insurers, claims adjusters and repair shops and other vendors are embracing the digital channels that enable them to work efficiently with one another toward resolution of the claims. And by leveraging technology to help speed the process, the actual journey from filing a claim to having funds paid out becomes more intuitive and ultimately consumer friendly.

One such example is multi-party payments, a cumbersome effort where more than one party needs to endorse a payment.

CCC, with its platform approach working with a financial partner, has digitized this process enabling one party to endorse payments to other parties in a secure and streamlined manner.

“We’re taking cues from other industries, like the legal industry, where you don’t have to be there ‘in person’ to sign documents,” she told PYMNTS. Consumers want to be able to interact across a variety of channels and also have a mobile-first, digital experience close at hand — and they want to see their payouts arrive quickly.

Drilling down a bit, within the B2B space, when an insurance carrier is paying a vendor, CCC’s platform has taken the process a step further, leveraging technology to embed authorization (and the tracking of authorization) of payment directly into the claims process.

“The insurer has all the information and the data they need, with authorization, to pay a repair facility,” said Svymbersky.

Customer Experience is Key

CCC’s decades-long history of working with insurers, along with its integrated platform, creates a “network advantage” as the company works with more than 300 insurance carriers and roughly 28,000 repair facilities, and it has ties with automakers and lenders too.

“These are all of the parties that have to come together to make decisions as part of the claims process — and these businesses touch millions of customers,” said Svymbersky.

Customer experience will continue to be top of mind as we move toward real-time payments, said Svymbersky, who stressed the importance of giving policyholders multiple payment options.

The platform and digital claims solutions technology, she said, allow insurers to offer a broad range of payment options, whether they want virtual cards, push-to-debit, or even print checks at home to take to the bank. The insurers benefit from operational efficiencies by outsourcing those payment functionalities and mobile experiences.

Looking ahead, Svymbersky told PYMNTS, “Digital transformation across claims is happening. Payments is a big part of the next wave.”