Stitch for Insurance: Powering instant claims settlement

Insurance products are built for a single purpose: serving policyholders during insured events, when they need it most. These events, often tragic and unexpected, might range from reimbursing policyholders for stolen personal property, to covering daily living expenses of families that lost a breadwinner or paying for the medical expenses associated with an illness or injury. It’s in these moments that policyholders will experience for the first time the benefits of the service they’ve been diligently paying for – often for years or even decades.

These policyholders expect an effective, empathetic and fast outcome when they need to make a claim.

A 2019 study by EY indicated that 87% of policyholders saw the claims experience as a leading indicator of whether they would remain or cancel their insurance policies with a provider.

It’s safe to say that insurers and brokers have a significant need to ensure their claims cycle is as efficient and customer-centric as possible, as the future of their recurring premium base will depend on this. However in many instances, this is not the case.

Challenge: Slow and manual claims settlement processes

The insurance value chain comprises three operational processes: claims capturing, claims assessment and claims finalisation (payment). Once a claim has been processed and approved, an insurance company should endeavour to settle the claim payment immediately. However, it doesn’t always happen this way due to operational constraints within cross-functional teams responsible for settling claims.

For instance, in many cases, insurers depend on their financial departments to manage payouts once a claim or partial payment is approved. The payout process is often manual and burdensome, and includes reviewing bank details, loading claims settlements to a spreadsheet before uploading the payment requests to their bank account. In addition, payouts are run only at specified times during the week. As a result, once a payout is finally submitted, it takes an average of two days for the funds to settle in the beneficiary’s bank account.

There are several reasons for this:

• Claims teams should not have access to bank profiles (segregation of responsibilities)
• Financial teams should not be involved in the approval process of claims
• Current processes don’t allow insurers to instantly pay a claim once it’s been approved, without financial risks and significant overhead involved

How Stitch can help insurers better manage claims payouts

With Stitch Payouts, today insurers can initiate disbursements via API instantly, as soon as claims are approved (or partly approved). This will allow for same-day settlement, with little to no involvement from the finance department. Claims can also be settled instantly for insurtechs that use automated machine learning processes to assess and approve claims.

The API will allow insurance companies to:

• Instantly verify beneficiary bank details
• Submit a payout request to the bank via API
• Settle claims payouts same-day or instantly
• Eliminate the need to log into a bank account, submit claims payouts CSVs or manually reconcile payout statuses
• Track the status of a payout via webhooks to allow for automatic communication with the policyholder when a claim payment is submitted and settled, and to help insurers automatically mark claims as finalised

Similarly, Stitch Payouts can be used to disburse claim payments to repair shops, medical providers and other stakeholders serving the claimant base, including medical schemes.

Using the Stitch API will significantly reduce the administrative burden on cross-functional claims teams, reduce fraud and most importantly empower instant service delivery to beneficiaries of approved insurance claims.

Improve your claims management process with Stitch Payouts. Request a demo