Saving time, money, and risk with One Call Insurance
Having spent the time and money building their own premium in-house finance system, One Call Insurance wanted to move away from complex TMSs or charge-by-transaction ERPs, and find a simple, cost-effective banking gateway.
The Company
One Call Insurance was founded in 1995 as a brick and mortar insurer based in Sheffield, opening 20 local branches by 1998. Over the next decade, it built a diverse portfolio of insurance products, won multiple awards, and reached the 500,000 customer milestone. In 2021, it was honoured with “Best Overall Insurance Broker” at the Insurance Choice Awards.
Now serving its 600,000+ customers with car, home, van, commercial, temporary, learner, and travel insurance – One Call is a forward-thinking and fast-growing customer of AccessPay.
The Challenge
Unlike many insurers, One Call Insurance provides its own funding, without relying on lenders to facilitate monthly payment plans. And with 350,000 customers on monthly direct debits, that means a lot of funding and a lot of repeat transactions.
One Call Insurance is also unique in that it uses its own in-house premium finance system, which manages most of the tasks that a traditional TMS usually would. The missing piece of the puzzle was corporate banking integration.
So with a growing transaction volume and a relatively small, niche function required – Joanne Rice, Company Director at One Call Insurance, went searching for a low cost, low maintenance, Bank Integration-as-a-Service solution.
One Call Insurance were searching for something specific
“We found that we were paying money for a platform just to send messages to the bank. After we’d built our finance system, we didn’t need that platform to hold the mandate any more or anything like that, we just needed a simple gateway to the bank. So we needed something new, but one that wouldn’t charge us per transaction either. We want to grow our business as much as we can, but we don’t want to just pump that money back into fees and charges.”
When Joanne found AccessPay, after being a customer of one of its competitors, there was a clear match between her requirements and the new platform’s functionalities. AccessPay could integrate with One Call’s bank, speed up communication via automation, through an SFTP connection and automate payments in a one click submission.
As well as providing a simple and cost-effective solution to a specific need, AccessPay also saves One Call up to half a day per week in financial processing time. With greater automation and fewer manual interventions, this means around 20 days of labour saved each year. And with that automation, One Call has also de-risked its internal processes too, because the banking submission is integrated and automatic – with no manual steps required, where mistakes or edits could be made.
Getting off the ground quickly
When your monthly transaction volume stretches into the hundreds of thousands, switching anything financially comes with a sense of urgency, but also the need for perfect accuracy. Ensuring a close relationship between both the technical and account teams is essential.
“I’ve done a lot of implementations to systems over the years and this was one of the best I’ve done, to be fair. It was nice and simple, Matt was straight on the ball kicking it off, Steven gave us demos and trials and was on-hand to give us help. Within a couple of months of the testing plan, we were live.”
Read more about AccessPay’s Bank Connectivity and Payments Automation.