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Sebastian Ribbers is a financial services strategist who helps insurers and Insurtech’s modernize how money moves across their businesses. By translating complex industry challenges into practical payment and financial solutions, he enables organizations to improve customer experience and manage risk effectively. His work sits at the intersection of strategy, technology and execution, shaping more resilient and customer-centric insurance ecosystems.
Fragmented Payment Ecosystems as a Barrier to Growth The most significant bottleneck, often overlooked by traditional insurers, is the fragmented payments environment. Payments have traditionally been viewed as a low-value downstream activity, but they can and should be a revenue driver. Fragmented systems leave significant untapped potential and create three main scalability issues: ● Manual reconciliation and inaccurate data: Relying on disparate payment systems and manual processes for financial reconciliation leads to burdensome, inefficient workflows. For example, insurers often cannot see in real time whether a policyholder has successfully paid their premium. ● Involuntary churn: Outdated card details due to expiration, loss or theft are a major hidden cost. The lack of smart solutions to maintain up-to-date card details leads to policies lapsing unnecessarily, directly increasing operational costs, reducing policyholder lifetime value and even causing policyholders to be unaware that their policy has lapsed. ● Friction in the customer journey: Redirections in the payment process, manual entry of card details and lack of payment method options cause customers to drop out of the initial purchase journey. This affects growth and conversion, especially for mobile-first channels that over half of online customers now prefer. Payments as a Strategic Lever for Customer Loyalty In the shift toward a relationship-centric model, the payment experience moves beyond just a transaction to become a core component of the overall customer experience and a key differentiator. Consumers now expect the seamless standards set by the retail and fintech industries. Modern payment capabilities directly boost customer lifetime value and retention by ensuring seamless, uninterrupted premium collections. Tools like automatic card updaters and smart retry logic prevent involuntary churn caused by expired payment details. Furthermore, conversion rates are optimized by allowing customers to pay using their preferred method, such as digital wallets, through high-converting, mobile-friendly platforms. Finally, we get to the most critical customer interaction. The claim process. Claims can be digitally transformed with virtually issued cards for instant payouts, building deep customer loyalty. “Modern payment capabilities directly boost customer lifetime value and retention by ensuring seamless, uninterrupted premium collections. Tools like automatic card updaters and smart retry logic prevent involuntary churn caused by expired payment details.” Unlocking the Intelligence Hidden in Payment Data Insurers significantly underutilize the rich data available from payments, largely because many payment processors simply cannot provide it. An example of one of the most critical, yet often missed, signals are the real-time specific decline codes generated during premium pay-in attempts. Many insurers are forced to treat all payment failures the same because their current processor only returns a generic decline message. However, systems that can interpret specific bank decline codes enable automated action. Instead of risking a policy lapse, this intelligence enables the system to apply smart retry logic or tailored communication to resolve a soft decline, thereby reducing operational burden and improving data quality without manual intervention. These data insights are also the engine behind massive cost-saving opportunities. This is especially true in the US, as it powers sophisticated strategies like Intelligent Payment Routing, which automatically directs debit transactions to the least-cost, high-performance network, directly reducing transaction fees and improving operational efficiency. Making Payments a Core Pillar of Insurance Modernization Payment cannot be an afterthought, but instead needs to be considered as a core part of an insurer’s overall modernization and digital strategy. A single financial technology platform that enables end-to-end money movement is the solution. This requires finding a platform that processes both premium payments, manages funds and enables instant claim disbursements. The good news is that payment optimization is not hard to implement and delivers immediate, significant benefits. This unified approach delivers a seamless experience across all channels, improves security through tokenization, and reduces the cost-to-serve, all without the need for massive system overhauls. We have seen one of the world's biggest insurers go live and begin processing transactions within 48 hours of onboarding, demonstrating that the time to act is now to seize the opportunity and implement intuitive, flexible payment experiences. Clearcover, a U.S. insurtech, saw authorization rates increase by 24 percent in three years, and average transaction volume increase almost 50 percent. Leveraging Adyen’s technology, they also saw an average of US $2 of cost savings per transaction in the last six months with Intelligent Payment Routing for US debit.