All-in-One Platforms Help Insurers Meet Customers Where They Want to Get Paid

Insurance is one of the most complex industries, marked by multiple touch points among several stakeholders — from carriers to customers, claims adjusters to contractors.

One Inc. Chief Revenue Officer Kevin Ostrander told PYMNTS that payments remain among the most important touch points within those interactions, yet payments are inefficient, often paper-based. However, the insurance industry has been going through what he called “a massive digital transformation over the last 20 years” that promises to speed up workflows and payments.

That transformation was initially focused on core systems, where carriers began to move off their legacy systems, which housed hundreds of applications that governed and ran insurance operations, from billing to claims. Carriers have been striving to streamline all manner of processes and drive an optimized customer experience, he said.

As for the payments, “when you think generally about payments overall, the concept of accepting a payment or pushing a payment isn’t really complicated,” he said. But what is complicated is getting to the point where, in property and casualty, life insurance and other segments, carriers can meet customers where, when and how they want to pay and be paid.

Paper Still Dominates

“Paper is still dominant within the insurance industry, both on the inbound premium side as well as on the disbursement side,” Ostrander said.

Interactions with customers are infrequent, as premiums may be paid once a year or on a staggered monthly basis — and they’re typically paid even less frequently when a claims process is completed.

Those relatively limited engagements give insurers a few critical junctures to move to digital means of connection, from SMS communications to digital invoices and payments.

One’s unified insurance platform offers carriers a fully functional payment solution that solves “the unique needs of the insurance industry, while also delivering a seamless and consistent user experience across the end-to-end lifecycle,” spanning inbound premium payments, new business binders or payments that are conducted over the phone (through IVR) with call centers, Ostrander said.

“You want to have the same consistent user experience regardless of how they’re engaging with you,” he said.

That standard UX is rendered through customer profiles, consistent payment-related settings and a frictionless payment experience — and centralized wallets wherein those payment instruments (such as debit cards) are housed, he said.

“If you’re going to use your debit card to make a policy premium payment, why would a carrier ask you to reenter your debit card information when it’s time for a claims process?” Ostrander said. “Why should they ask you to reenter your debit card information when you’re going through a premium refund? That information should be available, and that customer wallet should follow you around anytime you’re engaging ultimately with that carrier.”

The platform transcends the capabilities that would be available if carriers opted to embrace a range of standalone solutions to digitize their operations, he said. There are also benefits of harnessing the unified solution to improve back-end processes, especially with treasury management, due to linking with a single banking partner and single reconciliation solution.

“This simplifies audit trails and financial tracking,” he said. “There’s standardization in APIs, there’s standardization in client support, whether that is technical or client account management,” and in complying with data security as well.

On the regulatory front, there are state-by-state regulations that govern payment timeliness and optionality that are in turn made easier to comply with as carriers link to One Inc. (In some states, offering a digital payment to an end user must come before a customer opts to receive a paper check.)

“There’s tremendous benefit there for carriers as they look to work with a third party that stays in lockstep — from a regulatory perspective and from a solution perspective — to deliver iterative value in a rapidly changing environment,” Ostrander said.