Pathpoint offered direct bill for E&S markets and grew appointments by 3x
Ascend has helped us appoint more agents by offering an admitted payment workflow for the non-admitted markets - something that’s never been done before but agents have wanted for a long time.
About Pathpoint
Pathpoint was built to make it faster and easier for retail agents to get great small commercial E&S coverage options.
Agents can quote and bind coverage from carriers rated A or better by AM Best for small business clients online with one streamlined submission as well as receive multiple bindable quotes for clients in minutes, not days.
Challenges
Pathpoint faced the challenge of managing payments from multiple sources such as checks, wires, and ACH, which were received in various operational accounts. This created a complex task of determining which policies the payments should be applied to within Pathpoint's system.
On top of this, Pathpoint worked with a premium finance vendor and had to reconcile all these payments coming from them separately within their AMS. All of these caused a significant amount of time spend doing daily reconciliation by the team.
Ascend is a big step forward for us - before, it was hard to answer any payment question from agents. Now, we have full transparency and know what was paid, how, and when with complete accuracy.
Solution
Ascend's technology enabled Pathpoint to streamline their payment processes by creating a unified payment layer (PathPay) that reconciled all incoming receivables.
This resulted in a simplified payment system and allowed agents the ability to choose if they wanted to agency bill or direct bill policies, a level of flexibility previously unavailable in the market.
Additionally, Pathpoint utilized Ascend's payments automation and digitization to reduce the time and resources required for AP and AR.
Results
Pathpoint has been able to go out to networks, aggregators, and clusters and offer a payment experience similar to admitted markets, but for non- admitted markets. These partnerships have allowed Pathpoint to nearly triple the number of appointed agents.
Alongside this growth, CSR and finance teams save over 10 hours a week that are spent troubleshooting payment related follow ups. What used to be an 8+ step process to identify, followup, and solve payment inquiries is reduced to no more than 3 steps for the team to resolve.
By also allowing agents to choose direct bill when working with Pathpoint, Pathpoint has also seen a decrease in default risk. Pathpoint is now able to wait until payment has been received before binding coverage. This eliminates default risks that are associated with agency bill where policies are sometimes bound before payment and then cancelation processes are triggered when agencies are slow to fund their wholesalers.
Built with, and trusted by,insurance teams.
Ascend is a big step forward for us - before, it was hard to answer any payment question from agents. Now, we have full transparency and know what was paid, how, and when with complete accuracy.