28/02/2023

Imburse Payments – Scaling Through Partnerships

In our previous blog, we explained why payments is mission critical for insurers, including both claims payouts and premium collections. In this article we explore how the Imburse partner ecosystem works, along with describing the benefits for partners to work with Imburse.

Insurance ecosystems have been on the rise for the past few years as noted by McKinsey. These ecosystems, bolstered by the ongoing drive toward digitization, are interconnected sets of services that allows users to fulfil a variety of needs in one integrated experience. In the realm of partnerships, an ecosystem is a network of businesses who serve similar audiences but are not competitors and can therefore benefit from collaborative marketing and sales strategies.

Through a single connection, Imburse connects any organisation, regardless of existing IT infrastructure and finance processes, to the entire global payments ecosystem, for collections and payouts. We create strategic partnerships to save insurers time and effort, along with further enhancing their offerings for the changing digital landscape. Now let’s get into how the partner ecosystem works.

The Imburse Partner Ecosystem

One of the key differentiators driving the scalability of the Imburse platform is that we are provider agnostic. This enables any partner to collaborate with Imburse and provide any client with payment capabilities. For example, we partner with PSP’s including Stripe, Go Cardless, and Worldpay to enable insurers to access payments across the globe.

Be it core systems or payment providers, the Imburse platform and business model bring value and manage risks to cater to our partners’ needs.

How does Imburse bring value for insurers and partners?

  • Multiple ways to receive an instruction to collect premium and pay out premium
  • Tokenization services that are agnostic to PSP’s
  • Directive and mandate management tools
  • Capability for insurers to design their ideal payment workflow
  • Access to any provider that insurers need in any market

 

How does Imburse help partners with their go-to-market initiatives?

As a subject matter expert for insurance payments, Imburse builds transparent relationships to work with partners toward long-term goals. We build a joint go-to-market strategy where we engage in marketing activities together, along with identifying use cases and generating leads. In addition, we offer flexible commercial models where partners can resell and co-sell our solution and have a joint approach on RFPs.

Building a joint market approach with partners

Through working with Imburse, partners can grow their accounts by upselling on payment topics. This is possible by offering added value to their offering around claim payouts and other insurance products where payments are mission critical.

In addition, partners gain access to core system integration projects as we come pre-integrated in claim and billing platforms; this includes access to the Duck Creek platform. When looking at longer-term initiatives, partners can also add payment capabilities to large digital transformation projects.

Partnership Types

Imburse develops partnerships with core insurance systems and system integrators (SI’s), as well as Payment Service Providers (PSP’s) and other payment-related technologies and services. Let’s have a quick look at what each of the three key partnership types mean.

Strategic Alliances – Bringing unmatched value to partners around payment connectivity. This includes Consulting Firms and Global System Integrators.

Solution Partnerships – Building connections between different platforms to optimize end-to-end insurance product process. This includes Core Systems and CRM Systems.

Technology Partnerships – Embedding technology into existing product and marketplaces. This includes Insurance Technology Businesses and Payment Service Providers.

Core Systems

Imburse connects with core systems for claims, billing, ERP and CRM, enriching multiple global marketplaces with our offering. Through Imburse, insurers can quickly deploy any payment provider and/or payment technology to satisfy customers with zero operational impact.

Efficient access to global payments

Imburse partners with core systems to receive an instruction to either make a collection or pay out a claim. For the insurance client, if they already have a core system, they don’t then have to build anything else because they can use the instruction that comes from the core system to tell us what to do.

Partnering is beneficial for core systems because they don’t integrate with the entire global payments ecosystem. They might integrate with one or two payment services providers or payment services but not as many as we do. Imburse does all the heavy lifting. We connect to multiple payment providers around the world and by connecting to us, core systems have access to every payment provider that their clients may need in different markets.

Payment variety and multi-tenancy architecture

Payments is a such a key business value driver that access to a variety of solutions is critical. As this is not available as standard from the core systems, Imburse is the perfect augmentation to ensure that complete payments variety and accessibility is offered, for collection AND payout. Imburse can supercharge business offerings in key areas such a premium collection, claim payouts, vendor payments, rewards/loyalty payments, etc.

Imburse also allows for the complex structures of insurance enterprises through multi-tenancy architecture, enabling clients to benefit from connectivity to payments. Imburse tooling can be easily integrated into the core system tooling, offered through portals or also integrated into the insurer tooling (through APIs), meaning Imburse is a key enabler for the business without the need for new portals and logins.

Key Benefits To Core Systems

  1. Extend your offering in premium, claims, vendor and rewards/loyalty payments
  2. Easy connection with your existing finance infrastructure and processes
  3. Access multiple payment gateways and PSP’s, giving your customers payment variety
  4. Integrate Imburse into your Core System via portals, or the insurer tooling (through APIs)

Solution Benefits

  • Reduce costs
  • Improve speed to market
  • Futureproof payment capabilities

Integration Benefits

  • Augment payment variety for claims payouts
  • Offer embedded payment methods
  • Access reporting and analytics with automatic payment status updates

Payment Service Providers

Payment Service Providers (PSP’s) are digital native companies that offer their payment technologies to digital driven industries such as ecommerce and retail, and so when looking into the traditional industries such as insurance there is still a gap around the integration.

Our payment provider marketplace includes some of the most well-known Payment Service Providers in the market. Together, they offer an extensive list of payment methods across the globe.

Access insurance accounts with no additional integration

In insurance payment providers still lag behind, as insurers face many challenges around integrations and multiple options rather than being locked in with a single provider. We offer PSP’s access to insurance accounts with no additional integration beyond the one to our marketplace. Our clients get access to any provider we onboard free of charge and our providers sign an agreement directly with their clients as we don’t charge any transaction fees.

Key Benefits To PSP’s

  1. Access to insurance market via an independent software vendor
  2. We integrate with PSP’s on a regular basis, so integrations into new PSP’s are extremely fast
  3. Access to our core system partner ecosystem
  4. Imburse introduces new RFP opportunities

Why PSP’s win insurance accounts with Imburse

  • Commercial – Insurers negotiate and sign commercial agreement directly with PSP.
  • Pricing – Imburse pricing model based on technology, support and competency.
    No transactions fees
  • Capabilities – Imburse capabilities only enhance and complement PSP offering to meet client needs.
  • Acceleration – Imburse can accelerate the time to first transaction.
  • Opportunity – Imburse introduces PSP to RFP based on payment requirements.
  • Integration – Imburse upstream integrations to core systems can develop PSP sales funnel

Global System Integrators

Our GSI partners provide easy access to best-in-class technology so that insurers can accelerate their digital transformation.

Key Benefits To GSI’s

  1. Grow your accounts and upsell
    sell the technology into their accounts to generate more revenue.
  2. Innovate and help insurers build better payment workflows
  3. Partner in transformation RFPs
  4. Introduce added value to your solutions portfolio

Technology

Technology partnerships focus on embedding technology into existing product and marketplaces. We work with innovative payment technologies to improve the speed and efficiency of insurance payments.
By offering digital premium collection and claims payment solutions, these partnerships aim to transform the payment experience for insurance enterprises and their customers.

Key Benefits To Technology Partners

  1. End to end claim payment solutions
  2. Easy API integration
  3. Introduce new products with payment capabilities
  4. Easy configuration via partner marketplace

Consultants

Imburse works with the big four consulting firms, PwC, Synpulse, Baringa, and EY Nexus, as well as other leading management consulting firms by supporting their insurance practice.

Key Benefits to consultants

  1. Payment expertise and knowledge
  2. Partner of choice around digital transformation projects
  3. Become an Imburse re seller
  4. Provide additional value to your insurance offering

In Conclusion

Being agnostic within the insurance ecosystem is one way Imburse delivers value, especially since multiple core systems identify the need to partner with a payment platform that manages their payment connections entirely. In addition, payment service providers understand that in insurance, the integration and provider lock-in is something that Imburse can help them to unlock.

All major ecosystem players from leading consultant firms to insurtechs and marketplaces don’t have the knowledge and capacity to build and maintain many payment integrations, hence they look to partner with best-of-breed technology providers that will manage all the heavy lifting in payments and let them allocate their resources and efforts on their core competency. This is the key benefit in working with Imburse. We lead the market in insurance payments, allowing our partners to win insurance and future-proof their payment strategy.

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