Transforming Claims and Billing: Embracing Digital Payments for Enhanced Efficiency and Satisfaction 

Welcome to today’s presentation. We are about to begin. Over to you, Jeff. Thank you, Karen, and hello, everyone. My name is Jeffrey Metz, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s webcast titled Transforming Claims and Embracing Digital Payments for Enhanced Efficiency and Satisfaction. This event is brought to you by Property Casualty three sixty and sponsored by Origami Risk. Before we begin, let’s go over some basic housekeeping items about the webcast console. This event is completely interactive and features many customizable functions. Every window you currently see from the speaker window to the slides to the q and a panel, either be enlarged or collapsed. So if you’d like to change the look and feel of your console, go right ahead. If you have a question for one of our speakers, please enter it in the q and a panel on your console for the live q and a at the end. We’ll ask as many questions as possible, so please ask away. And if we don’t get to your question, we do send these over over to our speakers after the event, so you may receive an email response afterwards. There will also be a couple of poll questions scattered throughout. So when one comes up, please answer as best matches your experience. And lastly, some resources have been made available in the resources tab, so feel free to download so you can review them at your leisure. Now let’s get to today’s topic and why you all are here. Financial transactions represent critical touch points in the PNC insurance life cycle, moments that can either build loyalty or create friction. Outdated manual processes hinder your ability to connect with and satisfy policyholders effectively. Today, we’ll be exploring ways to transition to a digital first model for both claim settlement and payment collection through cloud enabled technology. And here with us to speak about this, first, we have from One Inc, Drago Deserve. He’s SVP of business development. Drago leverages his twenty five years of experience in the payments industry to identify, build, and grow partnerships across the insurance sector. And we also pleased to have with us, Chris Bennett, chief strategy of core solutions for Origami Risk. Chris is a senior leader in risk and insurance technology with nearly thirty years of experience in client service, sales, and product management. Grego, Chris, it’s great to have you. And, do you wanted to tell us a little something about yourself before we begin? Thanks for your time. Yeah. I’m super excited about the, the content today, and, looking forward to it. Yeah. I I would echo that. Happy to join. You know, we get to do these fairly frequently. Really enjoy interacting with the partners. You know, really is a great story for for the the industry. Great. Thank you, Drago. Thank you, Chris. Okay. So why don’t we go ahead and get to our first topic and our first section here? First off, we wanna hear a little bit about the drivers of innovation in insurance. And, let’s start off with, some consumer expectations. How have consumer expectations for payment processing evolved over the years? Obviously, we know that there was a big push during COVID, but how has it continued to change since? Yeah. I’ll go ahead and take that first. Sorry about that, Chris. I’m just jumping in here real quick. The payments industry is constantly evolving. What we see is that, you know, with peer to peer payments and app based world that we live in, there’s really a new standard of expectation by the consumers and the clients. Now we have real time notifications that are sent in by the card brands and the banking apps. And at the end of the day, the consumer, the person that we’re all trying to serve here, has that same expectation of immediacy in all of their payment needs. I would say that COVID brought digital first first to the forefront. And with the ongoing natural disasters, really, any carrier without a digital disbursement capability, you know, I would say appears negligent, and it’s just one of those things that is really core and fundamental to the payments ecosystem today. Yeah. And I would echo that. I would say that that the expectation for user experience, and it’s broader than just payments. It’s it’s in every interaction with their insurance carrier, with their broker, with any provider that the insurance buyer is interacting with. Their expectations are that it’s gonna be as seamless and digital as interactions and transactions in other areas of their lives, and that that is no different in the world of payments. In fact, it may be even more so. So then what specific demands are policyholders making regarding digital payment options both for claims and premium remitment? I think customers want to be able to the the concept of the digital wallet, the idea that I can pay the way that I want to as quickly and easily as I want to, is absolutely something that they expect to be able to do. You know, they don’t want to have to print out a certificate and mail a paper check. Right? They they want easy payment transactions. And I think it’s the same from a claim side. You know, people expect to be reimbursed quickly. We we live in an era of, you know, the ability to quickly transfer money for anything, whether it’s, you know, something from friends, some transaction online where you’ve sold something. There are ways to digitally transfer money very, very quickly regardless of the type of transaction. They don’t want a longer process in their insurance transactions. They want it to be that frictionless and easy. Yeah. I echo many of the things that Chris just mentioned. You know, fast, easy, and secure. Ultimately, we wanna pay or receive payments from, an app on a phone. We wanna pay or receive via link and a text message. We want, you know, ultimately, optionality in the way that we pay or are paid. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, we’ve moved on from, you know, kind of not trusting payment ecosystems to really, really, really trusting them, which is a great thing. But now we, you know, have the the the other problem, which is, you know, perhaps some of the websites and other things are actually kind of fronts for false things. But it’s great news that we can trust the ecosystems, but there is an expectation of that trust that’s there and and is earned. Okay. Great. So let me then, let’s move on to carriers then. And so when you look at the insurance life cycle, payment activities occur at the beginning of the relationship and near the end of a claim. What are the key requirements carriers have for modern payment solutions in such an important part of the customer experience? I I would say certainly speed and accuracy. So can I can I pay as quickly as possible, and is it easy to know the amount that I need to pay? Or on the flip side, in transactions where whether I’m a a vendor or a claimant, am I being accurately compensated, and is it happening quickly? Those are their touch points. Those are critical touch points with the customer in the life cycle of their relationship with a carrier. So so, certainly, those are our key requirements. Yeah. Chris, again, echo that statement. And then on top of that, you know, when we talk to the carriers about, you know, what we need to do and and how they need to, like, look at solutions in the ecosystem, we often talk to them about cost and time to implement alignment with consumer expectations and reflective of the brand and image. Right? You really wanna touch and work with the clients in a way that they are expecting it and the way that reflects the brand of the carrier in the right way. We look at total cost of ownership, which is really driven by digitization. I think we’re gonna talk about a little bit more. We wanna take steps to prevent inbound fraud and and carding attacks and other things that might result in denial of service, and we wanna be able to stay current and with the industry and with the client expectation expectations. Ultimately, these things are just, you know, moving and operating and shifting on a perpetual basis, which is fun and exciting to be in this part of the industry. But, you know, as a tech provider, it’s always something to chase. So then how do digital payment solutions contribute to both operational efficiency and customer retention? Greg, well, I’ll let you take that first. Okay. Digital payments providers, digital payments provide insurers with faster reconciliations, smoother cash flows, and fewer errors. And so, like, let’s talk about real world example. Right? And if we’re talking about digitization, I’m really talking about that migration and that movement of check to some digital product, whether that’s a credit card inbound, outbound, or that is an ACH payment today or RTP tomorrow. So let’s talk about kind of a real world scenario. What happens if a check is delayed in the mail? Well, number one, there would be an automatic notification of a potential lapse in coverage. There’s gonna be a system generated actual physical piece of mail that’s going to be sent out. There’s gonna be a phone call, you know, from the consumer going, hey. Why did I receive these things? I sent my check ten days ago or fourteen days ago, whatever the case might be. But that’s a phone call that has to be picked up by somebody. We probably have a panicked client that’s paying over the phone to make sure that their insurance doesn’t lapse. Next thing that happens is a duplicate payment ultimately received, perhaps a demand for a return of the funds happens after that. Then we create an outbound check, and, you know, we have to basically, you know, take care of those costs and associated what happens there. And, you know, the reality of it is is a super bad customer experience. And so, you know, what does that mean? Well, there’s cost to accept a check. There’s cost to process a check. There’s cost for outbound check, and then we had, you know, two phone calls here. Digitization and the migration over to ACH basically eliminates all of those. And that’s what we really see is is this way and this ability to migrate the expectation and the experience from something that has numerous failure points. It’s not one or two. It’s lots and lots of failure points and moving that to something that’s just really state of the art and robust and, works every time, every day. Yeah. And I come at it from the customer retention angle. You know, one of the the the most important drivers for a consumer, and when I say drivers, I it’s gonna drive frustration. It’s gonna drive those phone calls that Drago was referencing. It is something happening either with the payment that they’re making to their carrier or with a payment they’re receiving. And, specifically, I come from the claims world. Right? So that that’s kinda where I started my career. And in the claims world, nothing generates more phone calls than than, you know, claimants, or vendors who are expecting to be paid, who haven’t received the payment. It it’s a source of frustration. It’s a source of, you know, erosion of satisfaction. So, certainly, the ability to have seamless transactions and to pay very quickly really contributes to customer retention, but there’s a secondary benefit to that too. And that’s in the claims world, we know that that one of the best ways to control overall the severity of your book of claims is to ensure that you’re providing good customer service and that you’re settling, resolving, and paying those claims as quickly as possible. Because the the lot more time that goes by without paying, the more likely that claim is to spiral or to have have worse outcomes. So it really does contribute to the overall, you know, not only the customer retention, but also to to the to the financials of of the company. So then, so, Drogo, does digitization pose any threat to insurers, from a security point of view? I’ve been, in in payments for twenty five years or so now. And really at the start of the Internet age, payments weren’t really very secure. I mean, it’s just a it’s an, perhaps a not spoken about truth very much. But, you know, as that industry evolved and really took on some components associated with PCI and whatnot, providers of payments just have to be more secure. And the concept, you know, really is kind of archaic to think that we will put something in the mail, which is perhaps trusted or not trusted, that has a routing number on it and a checking account number, and somebody can either intercept that or duplicate it. You know, that is inherently insecure environment in my mind versus, you might ask, how are digital payments more secure? Well, number one, all inbound use cases are handled within our system, not the carriers. That’s important. Right? So we offload and export PCI compliance and securitization of the information onto our ecosystem and our environment. Number two, all entry and transmission is encrypted and secured. Right? So right when you’re entering the number into the the website or your phone or whatever that might be, that’s going to be secured. And then number three, once the card is brought into or the account number is brought into our ecosystem, it’s tokenized. You know, these are steps that that tokenization step, if the one ink system was penetrated, right, it becomes valueless. Right? It it’s the concept of of taking information at high value and eliminating the value of it. So in my mind, you know, we we’ve gone from, you know, kind of the stone ages to the digital age, and, you know, the security of it is is, you know, from a the infrastructure perspective is substantially higher than it’s ever been in the past, number one. And number two, really, the threats are into other things of, you know, AI generated cards and account numbers and carding attacks and other things that happen rather than, you know, macro system attacks that are penetrating a a payment system. Great. Great. So I think that takes us to our first poll question. And so, again, as I mentioned at the top, please answer as best matches your experience. What do you believe is the most important feature of a modern payment solution for insurance? Is it security, ease of implementation, overall cost of ownership, or enhancing the consumer experience? We’re just gonna take a couple seconds here to go ahead and, get those results in. If you could please answer as best matches your experience, or best matches what you think, and we will go ahead and take a look at those results live. So what do you believe is the most important feature of a modern payment solution for insurance? Is it security, ease of implementation, overall cost of ownership, or enhancing the consumer experience. I think we’re gonna give this about another maybe fifteen seconds, and we will go ahead and take a look. Responses. What do you believe is the most important feature of a modern payment solution for insurance, security, ease of implementation, overall cost of ownership, or enhancing the consumer experience? And it looks like the big one is security. Does that surprise you guys? Well, in that well, this is a professional insurance audience, and so people who deal with and mitigate risk for a living, I think they have a good understanding of what the risks are. And and it doesn’t surprise me that people are worried about security with with, you know, technology specifically around the movement of money. It that’s it’s actually super interesting. You know, we don’t highlight a lot of the benefits of of implementing most of the times when we’re, you know, talking to potential carriers largely because we’re talking to perhaps the, you know, treasurer side of the house or the financial side of the house, and they’re always worried about the money. But, you know, there’s huge costs associated with security as well. So I’m a little surprised. But to Chris’ point, perhaps with the audience, it shouldn’t be. A little self selection there. Exactly. Okay. Let’s get on to our next topic here. So connected ecosystem opportunities. First of all, inbound and outbound payment systems, what are the advantages of integrating inbound and outbound payment systems? I’ll go ahead and take this one real quick. Unified platforms streamline both inbound and outbound payments within a single system, offering benefits like unified interfaces, centralized data management, seamless user experiences, and faster innovation through coordination of product development. Lots of buzzwords, but what’s this really mean in the in the real world? Consumers get paid quickly in the way that they wanna they they pay their premiums via single client wallet. So if I am paying my my premium, I might set up ACH. And if there’s a claim coming out the other side, I might get a text that says, hey. Would you like to get paid for your claim to account number seven five one one? I can say yes or no. If I say yes, that can be the end of the conversation, and it can happen. That happens through, you know, an integrated front end, back end through the tokenization of the payment vehicle and then the mechanics to allow that same vehicle to be paid out on the other side. Right? Enhancing the customer experience, making sure it’s efficient and quick. Right? Delighting and surprising the client in a way that’s good. So that’s what we look at is is ways that we can take the solution from front to back and streamline it and make it, you know, just like you would if you were going to Target or Home Depot and you return something. You take your receipt in. Sometimes you don’t have your receipt. You just have a credit card or vice versa, and they just go, would you like it, you know, refunded to your Visa card? Yes. That’s that’s what we want, that that normalized payment experience that just isn’t easy for everybody. And and and I would say, you know, kind of, another thing that I think about is it truly is the the inbound and outbound. Having a single platform, and integrating both of those into a single platform offer you know, it it really does offer a number of advantages. And I think it’s probably stealing the thunder from the next question that that that’s on the list. But that integration, the idea of a single environment where you have inbound and outbound flowing through, and you have one view of all of your premium and disbursement transactions, that’s a real benefit when you think about operational efficiency and not having to go to multiple systems or multiple sources of truth from an accounting reconciliation standpoint. Great. Great. And so, yeah, let’s go ahead and then, also then talk about the operational efficiency. So how does a seamless integration with the core system enhance that? Yeah. I mean and that again, I I probably stole my own thunder here, but, certainly, the the consolidate the consolidation, really does allow the treasury operations to have a much, you know, more cohesive view of of inbound and outbound premiums and disbursements all in one system. And that operational efficiency, I think the key here is is, you know, if you can drive operational efficiency, you can improve profitability and market positioning while saving cost. And I know McKinsey did a study back in the fall of twenty twenty four, and they they in that study, they basically found that you could potentially save up to thirty percent just by looking at and implementing more operationally efficient processes. So I think that really does contribute to that. Yeah. I mean, the the key, I think, word in this question is seamless. You know, we see carriers implement solutions all the time, but they they implement them in different ways. And what we wanna do is provide that initiation of payment, for instance, on the outbound, you know, when and where a an adjuster and a user is going to need it and want it. We want to, you know, be part of the workflows that allow for any escalations and automations of escalation of abnormal events. We see, you know, as with our partners for Origami, integrated tracking and reporting and making sure that that payments is just, you know, another leg of the stool. It just completes the interaction. It’s just baked in. It’s there. All resulting in enhanced data, which can be measured and can be used to to facilitate change and efficiencies overall. So I it’s, you know, it it’s kind of in the way that we operate today, and it’s just, you know, inseparable in my mind. Okay. Great. Great. So then let’s get to a a little bit of the modern technical capabilities that we have. So can you explain, the impact digitization of real time payments processing and communication has to, customer satisfaction? Yeah. And this does tie back to something we talked about earlier, but in its very simplest form, the promise of insurance, the reason you buy insurance is is fulfilled. That contract is fulfilled when a claim is paid quickly and via the method the customer wants. And if you can live up to your end of that insurance contract, to that insurance bargain, and do it in a smooth and and seamless way with that customer, you’re gonna drive customer satisfaction. They were well taken care of. They got value out of that partnership, out of that out of that purchase that they wanted. Yeah. Spot on, Chris. You know, in inside of OneInc, we kinda talk about two factors that that impact satisfaction. One is immediate slash timely communication via channel that a consumer wants. Right? Like, for me, I’m I’m happy with text. In a of cases, I don’t wanna talk to people. My dad’s not gonna do it. He just can’t read his phone. Right? You know? And then the second part of it is payment optionality. Right? Again, I I want that payment as fast as I can get it, and I trust the ecosystem. There’s lots of people that don’t trust the ecosystem, and they wanna check where they’re really comfortable with checking, and know what to do with it. And so, really, those immediate and timely communications and payment optionality and meeting the client where they’re at, not where we want them to be. Another thing I hear about often is about decreasing the overall cost of payments. Can you share how carriers are digitizing payments in order to drive down total cost of ownership? Yeah. And I’ll I’ll let Diego take this one because I was actually really interested in these statistics when we talked about these sort of first planning for this. I I found these fascinating. Yeah. It it’s super interesting. You know, when we work with our partners to interact with consumers, what we wanna do is make sure that we’re interacting and facilitating interactions in a a digital way that is going to you know, that text, email, apps, and websites that is going to then easily facilitate, you know, conversion or enrollment into digital payment options. You know, we see that, you know, it’s five to seven dollars to either receive a check or pay a check. Right? And so it’s it’s kind of a a weird set of math because it it hits you on both ways. But with check frauds, lost, stolen, delays, the sheetmet, other operating costs associated with checks, and Chris mentioned earlier, right, the phone calls that that happen out of them, there is a a tremendous amount of possible cost that tack on to every single check, and it’s not just the printing cost or the mailing cost that you have to factor in. So, you know, if you think about this, you know, on the inbound side, we’re we’re providing digital payment options at each interaction, and then we’re looking to not only convert, you know, that person that comes in and sees their paper bill in order to hold on to the website and then pay via ACH credit card. But we’re looking you know, Weneek is taking a broader perspective and looking at, hey. There’s entities out there that consolidate and shove through lots of digital payments either via credit card and or check based payments. These aggregators are a friction point that there’s very, very few people who are looking to partner with. And so we’re out there actually partnering with these aggregators to make sure that we’re converting those checks and credit cards into lower forms of payment to help people decrease the total cost of ownership. And on the outbound side, we wanna be high touch, high-tech. We want optionality as mentioned above. Digital payments are much quicker and cheaper than checks. Again, lost, stolen can be an issue plus this shipment. And, you know, we get various crazy kind of estimates on the amount of a cost of a check, whether that’s the Aberdeen Group, which says it’s, you know, like, seven dollars and seventy eight cents per check or, you know, Bank of America estimates that it costs anywhere between four and twenty dollars to accept a check, depending upon probably the industry you’re in and the geography and whatnot and and, you know, what sort of risk that you have in the the mail system that’s there. So, lots of interesting information there. Okay. Chris, did you have anything to add, or should we go on to the next one? No. No. Yeah. We can go to the next one. I these were all I I learned those statistics actually in in talking about them with Drago, what the real cost is. They were surprisingly high to me. And I understood some of the other costs that go with it, like, lost checks and the cost that goes into actually servicing those accounts. But just that that estimate was it it actually shocked me how high that was. Yep. No. It is it is really shocking when you just put it down like that. So let’s go ahead to some real world kind of case studies. So do we have any case study we can talk about even if kind of generally? Yeah. I mean, it’s a it’s a great topic. When we work with the carriers, what we do is a is a ten analysis in order to look at all of their outbound payments, and then we match that up against our our real outbound network to provide exact details. And so, you know, typically, we find anywhere between sixty and eighty percent of outbound payments are digitized. You know, you know, for instance, we do have a case study on our website. It’s a multiline insurer. They were able to convert seventy eight percent of their outbound vendor payments to digital. Right? And so we were able to take, you know, seventy eight percent of checks out of their ecosystem, move them over to a a digital first fashion that is substantially less costly. And so what are some of the key challenges commonly faced during implementation of digital payment solutions? Well, I I think from our perspective, we sort of see this when we’re working with with OneInc as well as with other partners, and some of it’s broader just to technology in general. But does the insurer have the resources internally aligned to support getting that technology to market in a timely manner? Meaning, from both from the business side, you know, to to ensure that we are actually implementing the way that the business needs it and wants to use it and layers it in so that they drive maximum value, but also from the IT side. Do the do they actually have the staff to support the project efficiently, to move it through? That’s certainly one of the challenges that we see. And, Drago, I don’t know if you guys see others. You know, there the the biggest challenge really is is the competition for carrier resources. You know, there’s no shortage of strategic projects, and then it’s a matter of, you know, four stack ranking of the ROIs as well as any other pet projects by the leadership. So, that that is typically the biggest, hurdle that we have to overcome. Okay. Great. And so how has, the client benefited, from using OneNings claims pay and premium play pep platforms? Excuse me. Talk a little bit about outbound first. Again, we, digitize about eighty of their outbound vendor payments. And so if you think about this, if we do a hundred thousand checks a year and, you know, the the difference between a a check cost and ACH, you know, something a little bit less than seven dollars, that hundred thousand checks will be more than five hundred thousand dollars a year to the bottom line. And, you know, as the scale of that grows, it grows. Right? So, really, you you start to look at carriers of any size, you know, their budget is gonna be reflected in in some immediate savings. Also, the operational efficiencies, no no phone calls for lost, stolen, delayed checks, no achievement to deal with. And then if we talk a little bit about on the inbound side, we have the ability to use payment service fees to drive consumers to ACH, thereby decreasing or eliminating interchange. This is a pretty big thing. Right? So, you know, as we look at the the overall cost of payments, you know, there’s a a variety of levels of, you know, how little or or much it takes. We’ve been talking about kinda five to seven dollars or so, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less for checks even on the inbound side. Well, a credit card with two percent interchange on a five hundred dollar bill, that’s gonna be more. Right? And so if we can do something to impact the steering of those transactions to utilize ACH rather than a rewards card, we can you know? And I’ll say free, but I don’t really mean it. But we can drive that transaction to nearly free. I mean, we’re going to take multiples off the cost of that transaction coming inbound and be in an environment where the the carrier can substantially decrease their inbound total cost of acceptance. And then, you know, incremental to that, we’re gonna leverage the digital touch points and, again, drive people to enroll in these in these digital mechanisms to do payments, whether that be inbound or outbound, and just be in an environment where people are engaged and carriers have the opportunity to engage clients in ways that that they wanna be engaged with. Okay. And so are there advantages to introducing digital payments in concert with a core platform into implementation project versus just stand alone? Yeah. And I’ll take this one. There certainly certainly are a couple that I see. And if we go back to the you know, just a couple questions ago, the idea that there’s a finite number of available resources at any one time in a carrier’s IT to dedicate towards a project, you know, if you can actually well define the process and embed the the payment platform and the core system together from the very beginning, so you’re designing that that how I want my future state to look incorporating both those technologies, you’re really maximizing the the use. You’re getting leverage with the use of those IT resources that are supporting those projects in concert or in tandem. So that’s certainly one thing I see. But I think even beyond that, like, I I know various you know, our partnership with OneInc, for instance, you know, we take a different approach than other just types of integrations. Meaning, there’s a much deeper level within the core system of integration between, like, Origami Risk and One Inc that allows for platform level functionality that that can be supported and enabled and turned on, so that you’re not having to build everything via an an integration. I think that’s a real benefit for clients too. It’s sort of that that deeper level of integration that can be built between a a payment platform and a core system when they have that sort of level of partnership. Absolutely. What we’ve what we’ll also find is that, you know, we’ve talked about total cost of ownership and ROI. What we can find if we implement a payment solution at the same time as a as a core system upgrade is that there’s a compounding ROI or business case for it that allows for this, hey. Let’s open up the patient one time. Let’s do all of the work. Let’s get it done. And the benefits are bigger than if they would be, separated into two different projects. Great. Great. So let’s go ahead and, get to our next poll here. And so what do you think is the most significant benefit of adopting modern payments in the insurance industry? Is it streamlined operations, faster implementation times, improved customer satisfaction, or enhanced integration with core systems? Just take about thirty seconds to respond to this, and we will take a look at those results in real time. Again, what do you think is the most significant benefit of adopting modern payments in the insurance industry? Is it streamlined operations, faster implementation times or timelines, improved customer satisfaction, or enhanced integration with core systems? Some responses in. Again, please answer as best matches your experience or your expectations, and we will go ahead and take a look at those results in real time. Let me give them another ten seconds here, and then we will push those results live. Okay. So let’s take a look. Okay. So it looks like, plurality here is faster implementation timelines, but it’s pretty spread out across there. Is that about what you all see as well? I I would go ahead and kinda revert to Chris’ answer in the last one, which is a little bit of self fulfilling prophecy here. We we see, depending upon, you know, the focus of a person we’re talking to, their their focus is gonna be different between operations and implementation and customer side. So, yeah, I definitely agree that that all three of those are representative. Yeah. Yeah. It did not surprising that there was a split in those three given the audience. Although, I do wonder if we’d had increased security as an how that would have responded in the polls. I’d like to be the hot one for first poll. Okay. So let’s get to our next topic here or the next section. So future trends and considerations. So for emerging trends, what emerging trends do you see shaping the future of insurance payment ecosystems? Yeah. I’ll go ahead and take this one. You know, first of all, I think payment events are being viewed as customer engagement events, and this isn’t you know, if we’re gonna touch them the first time and the last time and several times in between, there’s an understanding that this is the most common touch point, and we’ve gotta be great at it. Right? Not good at it, but great at it and make sure that we’re doing it in a way that consumer gets what they want and expect as well as it’s secure, fast, simple, all of those things that we talked about before. Another trend, RTP, real time payments, and FedNow. These technologies will be more broadly used than they are today. We see this a little bit in consumer apps where, you know, or at least the feel of it with consumer apps, with Venmo, with PayPal, and others where money instantaneously appears in somebody’s application. You know, generally speaking, those aren’t really using the network, but, you know, it is interesting the fact that now consumers start to expect it, and we’ll be able to use those modern technologies in order to facilitate, you know, quicker, faster payments down into consumers as well as vendors. And it it means something. It’s important to us to pay vendors in a very fast way too because if your car is being worked on and repaired, they’re not gonna order the parts until they have the money. They’re not gonna start the work until they have the money. And, you know, if they’re waiting on a check for ten days, well, that’s ten more days you don’t have a car. Also, you know, payments really, really is an end business. We continue to add payment types and wallets. Zelle has caught a little bit of momentum, which I think is interesting. But, you know, I you you look at people like Venmo and PayPal and the ecosystem, and and they start to talk about, you know, their biggest competitor being Cash App. Well, nobody’s dispersing payments to Cash App at this point in time. Is that gonna be a requirement in the future? Maybe. And then I would say kind of the last trend I would talk about, there’s both a bespoke payments solution and a built in payment solution. And people tend to find themselves on on one kind of, you know, end of the spectrum or the other. You know, the largest carriers are out there going, I I really want all of these features to do this, that, and the other. And other, you know, carriers are going, look. I I need to meet the industry norms, but I don’t wanna be special because I wanna decrease the total cost of ownership. I wanna decrease maintenance and and support long term. I wanna, you know, make sure that the people in the ecosystem can really support it. And so I I would say that that trend is that we continue to be really, really great at both ends, and the middle of the the ecosystem is, you know, a little bit differently served. Yep. Great answer. I would say the only thing I would add to that when you think about the the the idea of real time payments, and and we tie that to the broader sort of trends in the industry and some of the the terms that we hear. When you think about the the idea of AgenTic AI, meaning that you could have claims that are processed, you know, touch free, right, very, very quickly. They can be very quickly handled. The expectation is gonna be that those can be paid as quickly as they can be adjudicated. Right? So there shouldn’t be a big delay between when the claim gets automatically settled right away. It’s a valid claim, boom, we owe the money, and then when the payment gets there. So the idea of real time payments is just gonna gain more and more steam, I think, as as AgenTic AI becomes more, common in insurance. So then what opportunities exist for further digitization, either for the industry as a whole Right? The idea that you can as a part of another type of transaction, there’s an insurance transaction that you can make for that particular transaction. And sometimes that’ll be more common coverage, but you’ve got new types of coverages that are covering new types of risks that are getting to market all of the time. And many of them might even be short term or periodic. Right? The idea that that while you’re using this thing, you need coverage. That’s just gonna continue to to drive the demand for digitized payment solutions without a doubt. You’ve gotta be able to select, you know, here’s the coverage that I want. This coverage is only gonna last for the next two hours while I rent this, this, you know, jet ski, and I need to be able to pay for this immediately. So I just think as more and more products and you get more products that are driven to be more real time, it’s gonna have more of an impact on on the requirement that payments payments can keep up. That’s a great answer. You know, very interesting angle about the immediacy of of the insurance industry and the changes therein. You know, from a perhaps a guy with a few too many gray hairs and payments, You know, I I look a little bit at the optimization happening on some of the inbound products and just taking away more and more checks from coming inbound to the ecosystem and overall driving down, you know, the cost of acceptance. And, you know, there’s a and okay. Let’s talk about subrogation. Right? Hey. Subrogation is driven largely by checks today because, you know, a lot of the attachment back and forth and the tracking and the information that’s provided and using the subrogation claims is is paper based. And so, you know, that’s a great opportunity for us to be in a situation where a payment network, whether we handle the inbound, the outbound, or both, provides some opportunity and some density, in order to provide a a better industry insurance industry focused product that can drive down the total cost of acceptance and further digitize the ecosystem. And so let me, get you all to put your kind of strategist hat on here. What would help a carrier evaluate payment digitization as an opportunity and strategic action? Yeah. I’ll go ahead and, and go first. Firstly, I would say, digitization is about digitization. It’s not to say it’s about the cost of a single payment or the focus of a single payment. You know, we often see people kinda get, you know, really, really, you know, myopic and associated with the the way that, hey. I can handle an inbound credit card payment for, you know, two cents. You know, can you beat it? Can you beat it? Can you do this? Well, you know, here’s a different question. How about if I take that credit card and and convert it to ACH? And instead of the two percent interchange that we didn’t talk about in your two cents example, we’re now paying, you know, twenty five cents or ten cents or fifty cents. Any one of those is substantially cheaper than than processing an inbound credit card. So, you know, it’s really it’s a bigger question. Factors should be reviewed, like technical implementation costs, technical ownership costs, solution fit to use case slash fit to industry. I mean, do people really understand that, you know, a substantial number of payments that are coming in check today come from other carriers, and there’s an opportunity for the network effect to apply on the use digital pay to these paper payments that turn them to a digital payment? There’s, you know, the impact on operations call center, impact on checked receipt and check printing, impact on organizational security and compliance. We, you know, have opportunities associated with steering the consumers to the right payment factor, right, and making sure that that simple, easy, secure, fast, has some permanency to it. Right? It sticks, and it’s used long term. You know, we we have abilities to outbound payment network and impact on longer term digitization and making sure that, you know, we’re we’re driving to an ecosystem where we never print a check again. Now are we gonna be there in two years? No. Is it gonna be five years? Probably not. But, you know, we can have that goal in mind and and look to decrease those costs and all of the complexity associated with it. And then, really, you also wanna look at your consumer engagement philosophy and visions. And so all of the above factor into the ROI, you know, and and, ultimately, implementation’s gonna be based on bandwidth, you know, any other broad based or organizational tech updates, you know, and ecosystem changes. And so tons to consider, and it’s definitely not about if this is a kind of a, you know, an if question. It’s about a when question. And then, you know, when does this make the most sense for a company, looking to explore digital payments, more holistically? Yeah. Great answer. And I I would say I come at it when I think about it from a strategy perspective. I think, you know, the carrier really wants to start with, does this align with our business goals? Right? What what is the vision or objective that we’re trying to meet? What do we wanna be at market? So are we trying to position ourselves as having better customer satisfaction? Is that what’s important to us? Is controlling costs, important to us? What matters, and and can this align with and support that business objective? Right? So can implementing a digital payment solution align with and support that? And then if it can and and and that’s kinda the way to go, then think about, you know, how do we actually layer that into our environment. Right? So looking at our existing infrastructure. Right? So does it fit within our existing infrastructure? Does it make sense? It does. Great. So how do we prioritize getting something to market as quickly as possible? Kind of speed to value, quick wins. Right? So what do we think about implementing first where we’re gonna see kind of the biggest benefit from this new technology? And then we can figure out what else we can do with it as we go. So it it’s just sort of a a the rigor of going through and and solving it. You know, is it driving your business objective is really the most important most important question to answer, though. And so how should they go about assessing the appropriateness of the move for their organization? I think this dovetails go ahead, Chris. Yeah. I’ll go ahead, Dragad. Just a second. Yeah. This dovetails really, really tightly with the previous question. You know, the if and when comment, it’s really inevitable. Right? So we we’re in an environment where everybody has looked at at payments as a you know, what can we do to, you know, meet the the the the needs of the industry? And then the next question is, how can we get a strategic advantage associated with implementing a payment solution? And so, you know, the questions, you know, Chris hit on all of these. Right? You know, what’s gonna take to to get to the end goal, having these live? You know, how does that align with the needs of the the business and the specific consumers? Right? Consumers or carriers do not all look the same. They they look quite a bit different across the board. And then understanding, you know, all of those pieces and parts that we just previously talked about, you know, what’s gonna be the best time for the carrier, and when are they gonna have resources to do it. Agreed. Well, they I I agree wholeheartedly. Okay. So then, are there advantages to having a large vendor network when it comes to digital payments? Yeah. I’ll go ahead and take that one pretty quickly. This is a great question. You know, let’s just first, what are we talking about when we’re talking about the the vendor network? One Inc. Has, you know, a number of carriers out in the ecosystem. We have relationships with close to three hundred carriers now. You know, a large portion of those are claims pay, meaning the they were doing outbound payments. Over the course of time, we’ve understood that this is not you know, it’s not a trivial thing. It it’s a very distinct and specific asset. But when you have an asset, you wanna maintain and grow it. Right? And so that’s exactly what we’ve done. So over time, we’ve, you know, basically stacked up all of these vendors that we pay. We provide a system and an ecosystem whereby vendors can go in and select the form of payment the way that they wanna get it. Often, that goes down to a digital path and allowing us to kind of board those holistically into the ecosystem. And so what does that mean? Well, the next carrier that comes along, we’re not exploring. Right? We don’t try to find vendors. With with nearly a million vendors in the ecosystem, we’re able to go, I see all the people that you’re paying. And of those people that are already in my system, I can digitize sixty, seventy, eighty percent of your outbound payments. And I talk about sixty because I’m just a conservative person, you know, by nature, but we do people we do see people in the the upper seventies, you know, low eighties in the way that they’re able to digital digitize their vendor network. So, I I think that this is one of the biggest assets, one of the biggest drivers of, you know, value of One Inc as a company is our ability to to really digitize outbound payments and do it in a in a fantastic way that works with the vendors. Great. So then how can insurers leverage advanced analytics to improve payment operations? So this is another one of those areas where kind of as a as a partner that’s in the in the industry and in the space, learning this as we went through this process from with Drago was was really interesting to me. So I’ll I’ll let him take these numbers. But, again, I found these I found these super interesting. Yeah. I mean, what we what we find today is that, you know, digital adoption today is is is all over the board. We do see carriers that have a hundred percent of checks that that they’re continuing to use, but a more typical range might be about twenty five percent. If we’re able to move those up to, say, seventy five percent, it’s a humongous, right, change in the amount of outbound check costs, operation costs associated with shipment, calls, and whatnot. You know, without OneInc, the average redemption time is about, you know, I’d call it fifteen days. It’s, like, fourteen point seven five days. And with with with OneInc, we we drop that average redemption time to eight point two five days. Right? So we take a, you know, almost a full week out of the ecosystem. And, you know, there’s probably a bit of a long tail on this. And, you know, as you start to look at the averages, you know, there’s certain, you know, anomalies that will will push one way or another. But with ACH, right, we have to be funded before we pay it. There might be a, you know, kind of a a one, two day payment period, and then that’s gonna stack up a tremendous amount of those payments. And then there’s other payments just to redeem fairly slowly. You know, I I would say that, you know, if we kind of more holistically look up at the at the question, you know, I I would be super interested if I was a carrier to really understand the the true cost, the true direct and indirect cost of payments. So from an analytics perspective, really look, you pay activity based costing associated with each one of those activities and making sure that that that is, you know, pinpointed. This really goes into, you know, some of the, like, kinda how do you operate, how do you design, how do you measure that program. And, you know, we do see some carriers going, hey. I know this is gonna work. Let’s go. And not spend a whole lot of time on the math, and we see other carriers that spend a lot of time on the math and and very specifically specifically track it. You know, either case, I’m I bought, you know, ultimate confidence that the ROI is there. So, you know, it’s just a matter of of how detailed the analytics can be on the other side of it. And from our perspective, you know, as as sort of a core system provider, one of the things obviously that that we provide are those sort of dashboards for executives and and other stakeholders within the system. These are exactly the types of KPIs that you think about rolling a new technology that make it very, very measurable and that you can actually put as KPIs on a dashboard to see the impact of of that investment. Perfect point, Chris. That’s great. Now before we get to, our final, conclusions and thoughts, I just want to remind everybody, we do have a question and answer session. We might get to one or two questions. So if you did have a question, go ahead and start getting them in. And now, just to put it in on the panel, the q and a panel on your console. And if we don’t get to them, you may receive a number response afterwards. So go ahead and get those in. So let me ask let me ask you both. How can insurers best prepare for the transition to digital payments? Chris, like to go first? Yeah. Yeah. I would say, you know, a couple things to to think through. One is understand understand what’s available to you at market. Right? So look at the payment providers that are out there. What features and functionalities do they offer? Are they are they both inbound and outbound? Are they one or the other? Like, what are you really trying to do? And it goes back to that business vision and objective that starts to drive sort of that search at market. So I think that’s pretty important. You know, understand that that we we’ve said this several times during the call. Payments are a critical touch point between a policyholder and the insurer. So it it it it’s a decision that you wanna make sure you are thinking about that that end user experience, that critical touch point with your customers, that you’re confident you’re selecting the right vendor. So that’s certainly a start. I would say thinking about an iterative process. Like, don’t be afraid to to try things. Don’t be afraid. You will implement projects that aren’t as adopted as you thought. You’ll have other things that that will hit. That sort of culture of of experimentation, that the concept of an iterative rollout or iterative implementation of of a system is really important when you’re rolling out something that’s gonna be a change for people. Yeah. Great answer, Chris. And and I would just tack on to that, you know, and maybe say it in a slightly different way. You know, digitizing payments is is not an if but a win, and it’s gonna happen for, you know, each carrier that’s out there. There’s very few carriers. I can’t even imagine any of it that would not benefit from moving over to a a digitization scheme. You know, with with all that in mind, we talked a little bit about cost direct and indirect before, understanding what those are. You know, Chris’ point, understanding the vision, understanding how that’s gonna impact, you know, your relationship with your clients, and, you know, then taking a look at the providers and and are the partners capable of helping you realize that vision, you know, to that, you know, unified inbound and outbound solution. You know? And then, obviously, a great project has identified specific measurable goals when implementing and tracking progress toward those goals. So, yeah, I I couldn’t agree with more on Chris and and what he said. Okay. Great. Great. So I think we have time for maybe one question here. And just just is there hold on. Let me get this up. As a reminder to the audience, though, if you did have a question, please, go ahead and put it in the, q and a panel on your console. We may, go ahead or we do send these over to our audience, so you may receive a new more response afterwards. So what are some common pitfalls insurers run into when trying to modernize their payment systems, and how can we avoid them? Great question. I I would think of this like like any other software implementation, and it goes back to something we already talked about. What is it you’re trying to accomplish? What’s the vision in in implementing the software? No software is a panacea for problems. Right? It’s not about just solving a problem. It’s about, does this align with our company vision or objective? Does it do what we want? So go into it with the right mindset. Understand what you’re looking to do, and and take it in bite sized pieces. Right? So whenever you’re rolling out new technology, focus on kind of immediate return and the things that actually solving the problems that align with your strategic vision, is the best way to to have a successful outcome. Jeff, I would just say as we as we look to this and one of the major things that we see, and I I mentioned this a little bit earlier in the presentation, was that this myopic vision of kind of, you know, a transaction cost. And or, you know, it doesn’t cost me five dollars to write a check. It costs me, you know, a dollar and then whatever the cost of a stamp is. You know, we have these kind of myopic events where we go, okay. That’s a little over a dollar to write a check. You know, I I don’t see the problem. The problem is that stolen check-in the the account that goes out and and, you know, gets rated for, you know, maybe thousands of dollars or more and then recovery of that, right, and the cost associated with it. So, you know, the pitfalls that we see are are just getting maybe a little bit too close to the ground and needing to to kinda zoom up a little bit and make that or zoom out a little bit and make sure that we look at the entire landscape and that we look at the entire value proposition ecosystem that we’re trying to operate in. And, you know, once people do that, it it it usually becomes a a really eyes wide open decision making process. Great. And so that is about all the time we have for today. I wanna thank everybody, in the audience for joining us, and we hope this is valuable to you. And a big special thanks to Drago and Chris for their time and insights and Risk for their support. If you missed any part of this presentation, this webcast will be archived at property cash day three sixty dot com slash webcast so you can go so you can view it again or refer to someone else. And you can also explore other upcoming and on demand presentations while you’re there. Have a great afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.