Vehicle warranty underwriter: enabling growth through an integrated payment solution

Our client is one of the largest underwriters of vehicle insurance, warranties, and maintenance plans in South Africa. Like most financial institutions, the company collects recurring payments from its customers using debit order. 

As one of the most prominent service providers, they process significant volumes of transactions monthly. Performance improvements in payment success rates can result in substantial business benefits including increased revenue, customer retention, and operational efficiency. 

With Precium’s integrated payment processing and recovery solutions, we were able to increase payment success rates by 9%* and deliver 268% return on investment during the pilot phase. 

The challenge 

Our client was looking for ways to increase payment success rates and secure future premium payments. They also wanted to reduce failed Promises to Pay secured by their contact centre. They were curious about the impact that alternative payment methods could make to their top line but had limited development capacity and wanted to limit the operational effort of integrating and managing multiple payment providers. 

Precium’s solution

A unified payments solution enabling alternative payment methods and collection channels to increase payment success rates and efficiency.

Our team conducted an initial customer journey mapping to identify points of failure in the payments and collections experience. We analysed the payment error codes to identify opportunities for improvement and collaborated with our client’s Operations, Payments, and Finance team to create a phased roadmap that delivered upfront value while limiting upfront capital expenditure. 

This involved implementing a unified payments solution across digital channels and the company’s call centre, that enabled customers to pay using alternative payment methods when their debit order failed, with the option to add an alternative payment method for future payments. To demonstrate value, we ran a ring-fenced pilot that: 

• Automated collections workflows with data-driven communications on SMS and WhatsApp to offer clients alternative payment options when their debit order failed. 
• Enabled agents to collect instant payments on calls to debtors using white-labelled payment links, reducing failed and disputed Promises to Pay.
• Secured future premium collections with WhatsApp customer journeys to secure an authenticated mandate from customers for DebiCheck and / or card recurring payments for future collections.  
• Optimised collection efficiency using A / B testing, UTM tracking, and sentiment analysis to identify the most effective campaigns.  

The impact

Implementing a unified payments processing and recovery solution enabled our client to significantly increase their payment success rates, improve customer retention and experience, and empower contact centre agents to achieve their collection targets. Selected pilot results include: 

• 50% customer response rate to digital interactions achieved in the first month, increasing contactibility by 500% on the call centre baseline. 
• 9% increase in success rates 
• 25% increase in Promise to Pay success rates compared to scheduled debit orders. 
• R500,000 additional revenue collected per month at ring-fenced pilot scale

Post-pilot, Precium integrated directly with our client’s dialler system to embed these optimisation workflows for both digital communications and to enable agents to collect real-time payments while on calls to customers through a one-click button within their existing dashboard. 

*Based on a pilot conducted from March 2023 to December 2023.

Precium is the first African payments platform purpose-built for enterprise. We partner with our clients to deliver payment solutions that enable quantifiable business value with the scalability, reliability, and flexibility required for high-volume processing. Get in touch to explore how we can help solve your toughest payments challenges.