New platform aims to have 100 insurance brokers on board by year-end

New platform aims to have 100 insurance brokers on board by year-end | Insurance Business New Zealand

Technology

New platform aims to have 100 insurance brokers on board by year-end

Co-founder and CEO talks about the problem his firm is keen to solve

Technology

By
Terry Gangcuangco

Ever wondered how many minutes it normally takes an insurance broker to generate an invoice, pull up quotes from premium funders, then email all the information to clients with the risk of inputting a wrong figure? According to Simfuni co-founder and chief executive Shaun Quincey (pictured), the average time is 23 minutes – time that could be better spent elsewhere.

“When you go online and you go shopping, you’re given a nice checkout experience,” Quincey, whose camp recently launched insurance payment platform Simfuni for brokers, told Insurance Business. “You click through, and it can be done in under two minutes… When brokers are selling insurance, they’ve got a whole lot of different fragmented systems and processes to be able to provide their clients with various payment options.

“Part of that is they may have to send them to an external credit card gateway; they may have to send them an invoice with a bank account number on the bottom; they may have to then send them to an external premium funding company to negotiate some instalment payment options for them.

“We thought, ‘Wow, that seems slow’. And it seems like insurance brokers could be spending their time on better things like providing really good advice, which is what they’re good at.”

Solution for brokers

To address the issue, Simfuni combined the different payment methodologies and fragmented processes into one platform that can be easily integrated with the systems being used by brokers. Prior to launch, the company worked with seven brokerages that helped design and build its offering.

“The Simfuni gateway gives [policyholders] the opportunity to pay fortnightly, monthly, or in full,” noted the CEO. “That seems kind of standard, but why it’s unique is it’s presented as either a QR code on the bottom of a hardcopy invoice – if the broker needs to send out hardcopy invoices – or it can be sent as a direct link to the client’s cell phone, or it can be a push button on a digital invoice.

“So, it’s just being able to deliver an optionality to pay in real time at the same time as the invoice is delivered. It drives a whole lot of key performance metrics for brokers, like improving the time it takes for a customer to pay them.

“A really interesting statistic is that 92% of people who get given the opportunity to pay on presentation of invoice pay on time. That’s a dramatic shift, with brokers just not having to worry about that part of their business and having to make follow-up phone calls 30 days or 60 days later to chase up customer payments.”

From a premium funding perspective, meanwhile, Simfuni makes staggered payments a standard option, instead of something a client would have to ask their broker about.

More than just payments

While Simfuni is predominantly a payment platform for brokers, Quincey pointed out that the cloud-based service does more than just facilitate straightforward payments.

“We’re the payment button, but that’s the front end of our business offering,” the Simfuni boss told Insurance Business. “It’s the easiest way to describe what we do – that we’re the payment button on the bottom of the invoice, but what’s sitting behind that is really what drives a whole lot of power.

“There’s a full digital credit control system as well for reminding customers about invoices; there’s the ability to do endorsements; there is also a reminder engine for auto rollover and renewal.

“It also gives every customer of the broker a self-service portal. The customer can log in and move their payment dates, change the payment methods, make a catch-up payment, or approve a new policy coming through for payment.”

As previously announced, the goal is to save insurance brokers substantial administrative time and costs. As for targets, Quincey shared they have plenty that they’re chasing aggressively.

“We’d like to think we can have 100 brokers on the platform by the end of this year,” he said. “It is ambitious, but we’re ambitious people. We raised some venture capital about three months ago to try and execute on that goal and that ambition. We really want to tackle what we think we can, which is making broker payments really simple and easy.”

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