While insurance remains weighed down by data, admin and paperwork, it’s safe to say the digital transformation march has well and truly begun. And although many insurance companies are making good progress, it’s also fair to say that finance departments still operate with manual processes and legacy systems. This is leaving finance departments open to data security risks, disparate systems and the need for human intervention when dealing with such sensitive data.
But this doesn’t have to be the case.
Here at AccessPay, we know that corporate banking is pretty complex, and many finance applications out there don’t connect with your banks. Plus, you’re probably operating from disparate systems including your ERPs, policy management and accounting systems which means everyday finance processes are especially complex and offer little control. With the added pressure to deliver for your customers, insurance firms have never been more ready for finance transformation. This can also give insurance companies an edge over their competitors, and that’s offering a great customer experience.
The power of Automation
Today’s customers are digitally native. They are ruthless in their comparison of one service to another, they readily share their customer feedback and customer experience can make or break firms.
Critical components of any digital transformation journey include the cloud and the general digital architecture of the company. With many finance systems, such as ERPs, coming to the end of life, insurance firms have been forced to look around for alternative arrangements or make, often expensive decisions to upgrade to cloud-based ERP systems.
Currently, when it comes to payment processing through an on-premise ERP system, most businesses are also still using spreadsheets, card readers and banking portal logins which are disparate and not without risk. These non-automated processes are vulnerable to risk and always open to human error. It’s also time-consuming, meaning your customers and suppliers are often left waiting days for money that is rightfully theirs.
By fully automating the payments process, firms can wave goodbye to spreadsheets and payments can be made almost instantly. Plus, with fewer manual processes and limited human intervention, there is less risk of human error and fraud. And that’s where AccessPay can help.
Our technology is powered by a file agnostic transformation engine, which takes any payment file format and connects to any bank. Enabling interoperability of financial messages means your applications and banks can talk to one another without intervention.
You can read more on exactly how we automate these processes here.
Dealing with digitally savvy customers
A good area to consider when it comes to automation is customer claims and payments. Insurance companies need quick turnaround times for these but typically they take days – this is a big failure in the eyes of digitally native customers.
Unfortunately, with out-of-date on-premise solutions such as the aforementioned ERPs being more prevalent than nimble cloud-based offerings, plus the standard three-day turnaround for most bacs payments; finance and treasury managers need to find better ways to automate and speed up these processes.
“There were several reasons we chose AccessPay and one was because it was commercially viable for us with your flat fee structure. This allows for future growth without having to worry about spiralling costs. It can scale easily with business growth.”
By automating the collection of monthly premiums, a quick win can mean differentiating with same-day insurance pay-outs. Same-day pay-outs will match the experience customers get in their day-to-day banking; embedded personal banking has been around for years but this is still a relatively new thing in the corporate banking world.
Automating claims pay-outs, refunds or just general office payments at a corporate level is also healthier for regulation and more easily auditable, which is particularly beneficial when your banking operations aren’t just about your payments, but your customers too.
And Chris was happy to comment on how this has helped Admiral Insurances’ customer service;
And then there is the need for an alternative to transaction-based charges. Margins are tight in insurance and a transaction-based charging model is rarely commercially viable when transactions reach a certain threshold.
Chris Allison, Project Manager from Admiral Insurance spoke about how he was looking for a solution that would scale with the businesses growth targets, and why he chose us;
You can read more about our cash visibility tool here.
Winners in the insurance industry can be readily identified by how they prize the customer experience and have a laser-like focus on delighting their customers. By pivoting to being service-led firms and embracing embedded corporate banking, firms can futureproof their business model for years to come, underpinned by flexible digital architecture that flexes with the demands of the business, insurance companies will put themselves in a much stronger position to face the ever-changing demands of their digitally-savvy customers.
If you’re interested in how AccessPay can support you on your finance transformation journey, we wanted to leave you with this quote from our customer, Admiral Insurance;
