Small steps pay off for better insurance experience

Real-time payment solutions offer the insurance industry a way to leap ahead on customer experience and retention by first solving key pain points before committing to larger scale transformation, NAB’s insurance specialist team says.

By  Corporate and Institutional Banking

“If we get this right, it directly supports retention, because loyalty alone just isn’t enough anymore. It also simplifies the underlying process - reducing manual handling, improving straight‑through processing, and freeing teams up to focus on higher‑value work.”

Customer first

Interactions vital to the business relationship include when a customer first starts with the insurer, when there’s an amendment to the policy, and most importantly, when there’s a claim.

“This can be an especially intense part of any customer’s life,” Kumar says. “As a payments provider, we play a role here in helping insurers to bring these critical interactions into the modern payments ecosystem to make them as best as they can be.”  

Kumar says a model example of how to do this has been with GT Insurance, a wholly‑owned subsidiary of Allianz Australia operating as a specialist underwriting agency, with deep expertise across transport, heavy motor, and a wide range of specialised commercial risks.

In discussions with GT executives, real-time payment services were identified as a good fit to solve an especially niggling challenge within the part of the business handling third-party recoveries.

At the time, the function involved a range of manual processes and phone calls to set up one-off payments or direct debit instalment plans, with the aim of recovering funds from at-fault parties.

This was proving frustrating both for customers and internal team members, who were all too often being mired in difficult conversations, payment dishonours and potential losses.

The NAB Pay by Bank solution instead offers insurers the ability to pull payments from bank accounts directly via a mandated digital agreement with the customer. This can be arranged simply and at speed, all within the security of the banking system.

These account-to-account transactions are done in real-time, allowing for more automation, better data coverage and back-office reconciliation.

Early adoption

GT Insurance Chief Financial Officer Marc Gross says the business is pleased to be one of the first insurers to adopt the PayTo technology which, he says, “has widespread application across our industry”.

“It’s been very successful and has helped with our operations immensely,” Gross says. “Primarily, this allows a significant improvement in the flow of information from the insurer to the customer and from the customer to the insurer.

“We’ve worked in partnership with the NAB over the journey and come up with a really good solution together. This technology is available today, it’s very effective, and it fitted our model perfectly, so we implemented. We look forward to rolling this out as an option now for other areas of the business, like premiums.”

Gross says the set-up also allows for better controls to manage legal, compliance and financial risk, with improved cash-flow visibility as an additional benefit.

Kumar adds that as legacy payment systems, known as “rails”, approach end‑of‑life and customer expectations shift, insurers are reassessing how fit‑for‑purpose their current models are - not just technically, but from a customer and risk perspective.

As an API-based service, NAB’s Pay by Bank works as a fully digital experience while retaining the flexibility to allow interventions where appropriate, along with other end process customisations.

Kumar says GT’s successful road to implementation shows how incremental modernisation can allow teams to build confidence, manage risk and learn while achieving value in high-impact test cases.

“Today’s real-time payment system is emerging as a shared win across customer experience, risk and operations. This is something all our insurance customers can benefit from and we’re here to help them to do it.”