According to CURE COO and principal Eric Poe, in an increasingly mobile and complex world, convenience is relative. “I remember having to write checks, but now even sitting down to do online bills is a task,” Poe says. “If every one of my bills came through a text and all I had to do was reply, that would be great.”
CURE ($100 million in total assets), which insures more than 50,000 vehicles in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, worked with Western Union to integrate the Englewood, Colo.-based payments vendor’s SpeedPay offering with CURE’s billing systems, reports Poe, who says the integration process took about seven months. “We went about one month where we didn’t advertise it, to check and see if there would be any glitches,” he relates. But since the text-to-pay option launched in September 2011, Poe adds, 20 percent of the company’s new business has enrolled for the service.
To access the service, customers register an account with Western Union and receive text alerts when their bills are due. When a policyholder replies “AUTO” to the text, the amount of the premium is automatically deducted from the corresponding Western Union account. Western Union charges $4.99 for the transaction, but, Poe says, CURE wanted to make sure that the additional infrastructure required for the capability was paid for only by those taking advantage of it.
“If you entice people to drive up the costs to the company, the people who don’t use it are sometimes the ones penalized” through higher rates, Poe explains. “We don’t want to charge everyone for a feature that only some people need to use.”
[For more on insurers' mobile strategies, read about Progressive's mobile document capture initiative, which enables quoting from smartphones.]
