How Digital Insurance Payments Can Optimize Your Business

by Business StrategyDigital Payment Processing

A lot of people seem to have the misconception that implementing a digital payment option for their business is a big undertaking. In reality, not only can the process be easy, but it can also greatly enhance the customer experience. More and more consumers now have the expectation of being able to pay for services with credit card or ACH. Younger consumers, especially, don’t even own a checkbook.

Businesses that don’t offer digital payment options risk falling behind their competitors and losing customers. And if you feel like you have a more traditional customer base, you can still accept checks but also offer the option of digital payments for those who prefer it (and at ePay we even offer a way to make paper checks as easy as online payments).

Here are some ways digital payments benefit insurance companies:

1. Improve the Customer Experience
Many customers find the traditional payment process for insurance premiums to be time-consuming and cumbersome. By offering digital payment options, insurance companies can make the payment process faster, more convenient, and more secure. Customers can pay their premiums from anywhere, at any time, using their preferred payment method.

2. Reduce Manual Labor & Streamline Accounting
Traditional payment methods, such as checks and cash, require manual processing and handling, which can be tedious and costly. By implementing digital payment options, insurance companies can automate payment processing and reduce the need for manual handling. This also ensures accuracy of data and streamlined accounting.

3. Reduce Risk of Payment Fraud
Digital payment options, such as credit and debit cards, offer advanced security features that can help to prevent fraud. Additionally, digital payment processing systems can be configured to detect and flag suspicious payment activity, which can help to prevent fraudulent transactions.

4. Stay Competitive
In today’s digital age, customers expect businesses to offer a range of payment options. By failing to offer online payment options, insurance companies risk falling behind their competitors and losing customers.

 

In summary, implementing digital payment options is not a big change for most businesses, and it can provide numerous benefits for insurance companies. ePayPolicy is fully committed to simplifying the payment collection process for insurance companies. Our sign up request form takes 1 minute, and then our underwriting team reviews your submission and requests any additional details to verify eligibility. Once approved, our team sends final account signup instructions so that you can start collecting payments within 24 hours.

Easy sign-up with no contract, no signup fee, and you can cancel at any time.

 

Case Study: MGA is First to Launch Automated Check Reconciliation

by Client Spotlight SeriesDigital Payment Processing

Bailey Specialty Risks, Inc. (BSR) recently launched CheckMate, our machine learning powered check reconciliation solution, becoming the first customer to utilize every ePayPolicy service. 

As a wholesale insurance MGA that offers professional lines, their journey with us has been unique, and it continues to broaden and deepen.

An indirect route to digital payments

BSR has been offering digital payments since 2017. Vickie Harmon, Vice President & CFO, says, “Our customers were not coming to us saying ‘Oh, I wish I could pay online.’ They were saying ‘I wish you would offer direct bill.’ She categorically could not. She also wondered if offering electronic payment to her agents would meet with resistance. But she checked out ePayPolicy and some other payment processors.

Milan Malkani, ePayPolicy Co-founder, convinced Vickie to try it. He promised that If she liked it, we could go deeper and customize it for BSR. Vickie picked a few agents she knew were tech savvy and had the type of business that would benefit from digital payment. She had some good response, although there was some pushback at first about who pays the ACH and credit card fees. Because of ePay’s ability to pass fees or absorb them, they have found a solution that works for them and their partners.

Integration with AMS

BSR uses Vertafore’s AIM, and integrated ePayPolicy fairly early on. Fast forward to 2022. Vickie says, “I was on the hunt for a new agency management system. AIM is not an ideal fit for our specialty business.”

At a conference she found herself at dinner with an amiable payment processor rep. She says: “I agreed to view a demo, and at every step asked questions like” ‘Who pays the fees? What about integration? What about dunning notices? We can pay our carriers as outgoing payables?’” She reports: “They had nothing, and they’ve been in business almost as long as ePayPolicy! No one else in the marketplace is offering the breadth of services you do.”

In the end, she stayed with ePayPolicy, and also decided to keep AIM. Vickie talked about a deposit reconciliation problem she encountered shortly after the integration. Suffice to say it got resolved once she brought it to our attention and ePayPolicy introduced Batch Deposits. Another milestone in our relationship was when Milan suggested ePayPolicy could send out Notifications of payment due.

Automated check processing

Most recently, BSR became our first customer to use CheckMate, our automated check processing service that consolidates check payments and digital payments in a single dashboard. Vickie says, “We have to create the payment in AIM regardless. Before CheckMate we would create the check in AIM and go through several extra steps to mail it. Now I export it to ePayPolicy and it goes to a safe digital lockbox, and I don’t have to think about it.” She loves having the same process in CheckMate as she has for electronic payments. She only wishes more carriers would sign up for a recipient account to be paid via ACH.

Biggest business benefit to BSR

Vickie credits ePayPolicy with creating an “incredible efficiency.” The accounting people get notified and they can stay on top of payables. “ePayPolicy makes it easier for those in our agencies to pay us timely. Operations people like us. They say, ‘they are so easy to work with. I can pay them in no time.’ Vickie says anything that gets people talking positively about BSR is a good thing. 

Advice to others on the fence about digital payment

“Just try it,” she advises. “There’s a really low barrier to entry. It’s a whole other way of doing business. Automated payments free up your time. Even if it’s five minutes, that’s five minutes you can spend on other things that aren’t not payment related.”

About BSR

Bailey Specialty Risks is a specialty insurance wholesale broker located in Hendersonville, Tennessee.  BRS offers coverages that include Professional Liability, Management Liability, and Privacy & Security/Cyber Liability. All business is written with licensed/contracted Retail Insurance Agencies throughout the United States

7 Insurance Industry Predictions for 2023

by Business StrategyIndustry News & Company Updates

For the insurance industry, 2022 was a mixture of positive and negative events. On one side, premiums increased for both personal and business insurance, largely due to rising interest rates, geopolitical crises, and natural disasters.

On the other hand, many insurance organizations made innovative changes to differentiate themselves and stay ahead of the curve. “We saw insurtech solutions disrupt, automate and enhance process efficiency and increase overall production across all channels of insurance,” said William Trainer, with ePayPolicy. “Organizations leveraged the power of data and analytics to better their forecasting and business modeling.”

We spoke with industry experts and leaders to see what they’re expecting and hoping to see in 2023. Here’s the best of what they said:

1. Social Inflation

Of course, inflation impacted the insurance industry in 2022 and it will probably continue to do so. Michael Fusco, CEO of Fusco Orsini & Associates, predicts that the most significant impact in the industry this year will revolve around social inflation which refers to the rising cost of insurance claims, particularly in the areas of liability and workers’ compensation.

“We will now see pricing increases in liability insurance across all lines. Specifically to litigation costs (litigation funding), increased jury awards (anti-corporate sentiment and nuclear verdicts), broad policy form interpretation, and tort reform,” said Fusco.

2. Carrier Rates Will Increase

Some experts are predicting a substantial increase in carrier rates this year. Because of the Covid pandemic and inflation, many carriers took very minimal increases in the past three years to help out customers.

Nicole Gonzalez, Enterprise Sales Executive at ePayPolicy, says carriers are taking a 10%+ rate increase in 2023. She believes carriers will try to grow by mirroring large insurance companies like Geico and Nationwide. “Call center [models] can pump in a ton of leads and write new business, with less overhead than a brick and mortar location.”

David Carothers, Principal at Florida Risk Partners, predicts, “we will continue to see more and more carriers require full financial underwriting to look at the viability of businesses moving forward.” They will look more closely at their financials and in many cases, “require collateralization against any deductibles/SIR,” says Carothers.

3. Consumers Will Shop Around More

The ongoing pressures of inflation, the possibility of rising unemployment, and dwindling savings may cause consumers to be more price-conscious in 2023. Robert Hartwig, President of Risk Management and Insurance at the University of South Carolina, believes “this will likely result in more shopping around for insurance given that this is a ‘big ticket’ purchase for many households.”

Nicole Gonzalez also predicts customers will be shopping for their insurance more due to the rising carrier rates.

4. Investing in Customer Relationships

The industry experts we spoke to mentioned the need to focus investments for the year in customer relationships and customer retention. Michael Fusco believes that “the technology that continues to evolve and enhance the client experience” will have the biggest impact on the market. When investing in ‘disruptive’ technology, Fusco considers that client experience “should remain the goal for all.”

William Trainer directed our attention to the importance of digital payment processing for customer retention as well as business process improvements. “The payments automation functionality will not only shorten the time to collect outstanding receivables and reconciliation time, but also can automate and track payables, and promptly adjust your ledger immediately,” says Trainer.

5. AI Will Become More Mainstream

As cost of operations increase, insurance companies are looking for ways to automate manual, labor-intensive processes. Mark Engels, CEO of ePayPolicy, predicts AI implementation will be seen “across the entire customer engagement lifecycle, from underwriting to onboarding, policy servicing and payment collection and claims disbursement.”

David Carothers also believes machine learning will be big this year. “With the further development of bots to handle normal service tasks, we may be getting ready to see the single biggest threat to underperformers in our industry,” says Principal of Florida Risk Partners.

6. Leveraging Partnerships

As the Enterprise Partnerships Representative at ePayPolicy, William Trainer spoke to us about the importance of strategic partnerships during these times. They allow companies to “collaborate and develop better customer-centric insurance solutions, much more quickly, and more cost effectively.”

Partners do not only improve the customer journey, but also make it easier for insurance companies to grow and expand their market reach. Ryan Bosworth, CSO of XDimensional Technologies, believes that in 2023 roles will merge between agencies, MGAs, carriers, and other organizations in the hybrid world of insurance. “Retail agencies are opening wholesale divisions, and growing wholesalers have been given complete underwriting authority by their carrier partners. In addition, we’ve seen carriers investing in revenue streams via in-house MGAs or retail agencies,” says Bosworth.

7. Resilience in the Industry

Economic challenges present difficulties to the insurance industry just like they do to other industries. However, Robert Hartwig explains that “insurers are organized and regulated in a way that ensures they can continue to function normally even under the most stressful of economic circumstances.”

In the previous years, insurers were quick to deploy technologies that allowed them to service customers in the best way possible despite the rapidly changing economic and political environment. Hartwig believes that the “continued resilience and disciplined operational approach” of the insurance industry continues to prove itself, “just like it did during 9/11, the financial crisis, and other challenging periods.”

“I have every confidence that [this] resilience will remain intact despite a recession that most forecasters believe will occur in the second half of the year. Growth in the industry will slow as a result but longer-term trends in the innovation and deployment of technologies will continue,” says Professor Hartwig.

WeSignature and ePayPolicy Launch Insurance eSignature Integration

by Industry News & Company UpdatesUncategorized

Austin, Texas, January 24, 2023 – WeSignature today announced a partnership with ePayPolicy, a market-leading payments platform for the insurance industry. ePayPolicy will be integrated with WeSignature, enabling WeSignature’s customers with access to robust payment processing capabilities.

ePayPolicy provides an easy-to-use, end-to-end solution that allows carriers, retail agencies, MGAs, and wholesale brokers to get up and running with electronic payments in days, dramatically reducing the number of paper checks they process while also simplifying their accounting reconciliation with automated data entry.

WeSignature is the first e-Sign Sales Cloud offering an alternative to traditional e-signature platforms by focusing on the insurance sales process and not just the action of obtaining a signature. WeSignature’s Send, Sign, and Pay themed portal is bridging the gap between contract execution and payment collection while also adding a human touch with video messages.

“Digital payments are the new standard. Policyholders are used to paying by credit card or ACH,” said ePayPolicy CEO Mark Engels. “With ePayPolicy, WeSignature customers will be able to meet their clients’ demand for digital payments and enhance their digital experience with automated payment reconciliation,” continued Engels.

“Document execution and payment collection have always been a required part of the insurance sales process,” said CEO Ryan Pegram. “Now with the integration between WeSignature and ePayPolicy, our clients can get documents signed and insurance paid for in a single transaction.”

About ePayPolicy
Since its founding in 2014, ePayPolicy has become one of the market-leading E&S-focused solutions, serving over 6,000 customers, processing over $2 billion in payments monthly, and leading in customer satisfaction with customer ratings nearly 5x higher than the market average.

About WeSignature
Founded in 2019, WeSignature is the first e-Sign Sales Cloud with focus on the insurance industry, serving over 2200 active users across industries, processing thousands of documents, and payments monthly.