NEW REPORT: Travel Insurance Gets Upgrade With Faster Claims

Is it time to retire the phrase “the check’s in the mail”? The availability of new payment and disbursement solutions is showing promise in clearing up all kinds of payment ambiguity, especially the question about when a payment is actually going to arrive.

The July PYMNTS Disbursement Tracker , powered by Ingo Money, highlights the latest payment tools that are promising to take certain uncertainties out of the massive $1.6 trillion global business travel industry.

Around the World of Disbursements

Some of the more notable developments in recent weeks were aimed at helping hourly and gig workers get paid easier. A partnership between Fiserv and DailyPay, for starters, resulted in a new payroll integration solution to help hourly workers get quick access to their funds, even during holidays and weekends. Another solution from payment solution provider First Data aims to make it easier for companies to act as payment facilitators and deliver money to gig workers, a development that comes as the gig economy recently grew to 55 million, according to the PYMNTS Gig Economy Index.

The travel industry also saw its fair share of innovations this past month. Take, for example, AmTrav and CSI globalVCard, who are working to help companies expand the use of virtual cards to make corporate travel bookings easier by offering real-time rates on travel, hotel and car rentals. The partnership between the companies comes as a poll conducted by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives identified some of the biggest adoption hurdles the technology faces.

Corporate travel is also the focus of this month’s Tracker data Deep Dive. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. airline industry is coming off its best year in 2016 with over 823 million passengers having taken to the skies for both leisure and business purposes. With a growing number of passengers traveling for business purposes, the Deep Dive highlights significant trends that are driving corporate travel and how new payment innovations like mobile wallets and expense management systems can further shake up the market.

Getting Travel Plans Back on Course with Disbursement Tools

Millions of travelers are taking their summer vacations. Sadly, the best laid plans don’t always work out for a few travelers. Any number of events, from misplaced or lost luggage to severe weather events, can turn a first-class vacation into a full-blown, costly headache. That’s where travel insurance comes into play. And new disbursement tools for the travel insurance market are aimed at helping travelers get quicker access to their travel insurance claims funds so they can correct the course of their disrupted vacation plans.

For July’s Feature Story, PYMNTS spoke with Joe Mason, chief marketing officer of Allianz Global Assistance, about the company’s new disbursement tool that delivers money directly to policyholders’ bank accounts or debit cards. Mason explained how these new services are removing the friction from the “moments that matter” when filing a travel insurance claims.

Find the feature story, a roundup of all the notable disbursement news and developments and a directory of 45 providers — including 10 new additions — from around the digital Disbursements space inside this month’s Tracker.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

TO DOWNLOAD THE JULY EDITION OF THE PYMNTS.COM DISBURSEMENTS TRACKER , POWERED BY INGO MONEY, CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW.

About the Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Disbursements Tracker , powered by Ingo Money, is your go-to resource for staying up to date on a month-by-month basis on the trends and changes in the digital disbursement space.