Core System Upgrades Move Insurers Toward Real-Time Payments

Insurance firms face a conundrum when digitalizing operations, as they accept and disburse payments that have multiple points of contact. Are they going to be tech experts, and take the bulk of infrastructure and security challenges in-house? Do they buy other firms that have the relevant expertise?

It’s the typical build vs. buy debate. But in an interview with PYMNTS, Sarah Owen, chief product officer at One Inc, said partnerships can help insurers deliver the best customer experience.

For all parties involved, Owen said, there are benefits to modernizing the fund flows.

“Anytime the claim is out there for longer,” she said, “you’re paying for the insurers and paying for the car rentals. They might be paying for a hotel for someone that needs a place to live. The repairs get more expensive. The faster that you can close out the claim, the more important it is for the consumer, because they are waiting for their car and want it to be repaired. It also decreases the costs for the carriers.”

For the individual policyholders, Owen said, it’s critical to offer them the payment methods they want to use, whether sending or receiving payments — including push to debit, PayPal or Venmo, as well as real-time options.

In the bid to settle the build/buy/partner debate, Owen offered PYMNTS a few rules of thumb: If the process is core to the insurance business, it should be built, as that’s where intellectual property resides — the so-called “secret sauce” of an organization. Building out a digital asset management solution to support branding or communications can be best served with a partnership.

“Our clients are really dependent on their back-office core systems. So that is their database of record. That is where they manage their whole claims process. That is where they manage their whole policy process, where they manage their interactions with their insured customers,” Owen said.

One Inc’s Approach

For One Inc, which unifies premium collection and claims payments across its platform, “it’s strategically important for us, from a payments perspective, to be integrated into those core systems so that we can enable operational efficiency,” Owen said.

One Inc has partnerships of its own — spanning 50 providers — such as Guidewire, which helps client firms tap into a joint solution that integrates a range of payment options.

The direct connectivity, she said, offers carriers “easy access to our workflows … and we cover the spectrum in the property and casualty insurance space by leveraging our APIs [application programming interfaces] and our technology … A carrier can send us instructions for payments, and we can automatically send information back to their back-office systems stating that the payment has taken place.”

As for the integrations and digital shift, Owen added that implementations that would have taken several months now can done in a matter of weeks.

The improvement of back-office technologies and the digitization of payments are helping to forge ecosystems in the insurance industry, Owen said, which can look to partners and providers such as One Inc to improve the entire customer journey — using artificial intelligence and other technologies to fine-tune risk management and create tailor-made, customized policies.

Another integration, with Hi Marley’s text-based communications tools, speeds up the process through 24/7 interactions, which in turn reduces the costs of the claims.

As Owen told PYMNTS, the right partnerships “drive efficiencies, time to market and the speed to value — and allow our carriers to get payments up and running very quickly.”