Why should global insurers care about their policyholder’s payment experience?

Why does the payment experience impact the insurer's business?

Two of the biggest reasons that global insurers lose international policyholders can be linked to bad payment experiences. Firstly, policies lapse because of failed, short or declined payments, and secondly, customers seek other, less expensive policy options.

The best payment experience makes a cross-border transaction feel as close as possible to a domestic one. But that is not the case with global insurance most of the time. Payers often lack options to see costs and make payments online in their own currency. They cannot use the payment method they prefer, and have to do a lot of detective and leg work on their own to assess FX rates and transaction fees. They also cannot easily make sure the amount due matches the amount they sent, nor can they easily see payment status. Often, that frustrating payment journey ends in a policy lapse or nonrenewal because of a short or late payment, or looking for another option because of the added costs of high transaction fees.

How can insurers better attract and retain these international customers?

Localising the payment is a necessary first step, but global insurers often miss an obvious and important part of scaling internationally – that customers will have questions and issues around-the-clock. If customers cannot get support with payment questions and challenges on their schedule, a days or weeks-long back and forth ensues that erodes customer trust, and that can drive them to abandon the transaction and place their trust instead with a competitor.

Payers often lack options to
see costs and make payments
online in their own currency

By enhancing self-service capabilities, and also giving clients access to human payment support in their local language and time zones, you can truly support a global customer base.

How can insurers improve crossborder receivables without a big-ticket IT project?

Insurers often come to Flywire with complex payment processing landscapes. They have inherited multiple systems through M&A, are collecting payments with different systems in different geographies, and are doing it all by patching together payment gateways and payment processors.

There is a better way to manage crossborder payments than taking responsibility to build a payment capability in-house and assuming the risk that comes with that. Flywire integrates with front-end quote to buy systems as well as the CRM and policy administration systems of record through a simple API or existing connectors. You maintain a single source of data and have control over what the payment experience looks like to your users. And we can have all this functionality live within weeks.

We are not only a payment processor. We also provide the banking network to move the funds globally, and software experiences that make high value transactions appear as simple as making ecommerce ones. Payers see their total policy cost up-front in their currency of choice (Flywire supports 140+), can pay securely in their preferred currency and method, and have confidence their payment went through. Insurers receive payment in their currency of choice, can track those payments in Flywire’s portal and/or see payments data in their system of record if Flywire is integrated.

That solves a lot of issues for the international insurance space – because carriers know exactly when they’ll be paid, how they’ll be paid and what that payment is for