Altus

A common approach to processing policy related payments across many types of product has long been an elusive target for many policy administrators. Too often, payment processing has been tightly bound into monolithic, product-focussed administration systems resulting in stove-piped operations with expensive and inefficient duplication across systems and business processes.

However, there is such a high level of commonality in the way payments are handled across different types of products that the potential benefits are difficult to ignore. Direct debit mandates, regular premium collections, claim payments, cheque processing, write-offs, credit notes, policy accounting; the list seems endless. The payments process is well understood and there are a host of off-the-shelf accounting packages that can provide the necessary support. The prospect of a single efficient process run on commodity software is very appealing. 

As financial service companies and their system providers move away from the legacy of monolithic administrations systems to a more componentised, service-oriented approach, separating payments processing from policy administration is becoming more easily achievable. However, the intransigence of administration systems is not the only obstacle. A comprehensive payments processing solution must address a number of other issues: conflicting payment models for insurance and investment products; the traditional separation of sales and purchase ledgers; handling multiple policies on a single direct debit mandate; and interfacing with policy administration systems.

Altus not only understand the issues, but have developed common payments solutions for our clients. If you would like to discuss the potential benefits or practicalities of common payments processing then please contact us.