Agile Premium Finance and ePayPolicy have teamed to offer insurance industry clients checkout financing options.
“With ePayPolicy’s latest feature release, Finance Connect, Agile now offers its customers convenient online financing enrollment and premium payment solutions,” the companies said in a Tuesday (May 14) news release.
“Finance Connect enables Agile customers to apply for premium financing – including e-signed premium finance agreements (PFA) — in a single, online session, utilizing secure connections to the customer’s systems and popular industry management systems.”
The release notes that financing options such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) have risen in popularity, with data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau showing that the top five lenders in that space grew 970% between 2019 and 2021.
However, the companies add, premium financing companies (PFCs) differ from BNPL upstarts in that they have long-held relationships with partners, and no need to justify their value.
“Central to the creation of Finance Connect was our intent to preserve existing partnerships with PFCs,” added Mark Engels, CEO of ePayPolicy. “We didn’t want to try and take business from them or create a marketplace. We want to help both sides work together faster, for the convenience of the insured.”
The partnership comes at a time when around two-thirds of consumers have used some sort of installment payment option at least once in the last year, according to a series of surveys by Splitit and PYMNTS Intelligence.
“Getting a bit more granular, the surveys indicate that 37% of consumers had used BNPL. More than a third of the lowest income consumers had opted for BNPL, a share that increases the higher up the income bracket one goes,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.
And consumers who tried BNPL liked it, with the research showing that almost 80% of consumers had a favorable experience with the product.
As to what they’ve been buying, more than a third of these consumers had used BNPL to purchase clothes and accessories, 18% had used installments to fill their grocery cart and more than 14% had chosen BNPL when paying for travel-related services.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster spoke recently with Splitit Chief Executive Nadan Sheth about the options for financial institutions that want to claim a spot in the BNPL market.
“I’m worried about consumers taking on new loans — no matter if they are short-term loans, or [certain] buy now, pay later loans to afford items they may need — but where the APR is 25% to 35%,” Sheth said.
A more affordable option, he argued, can be found in installment loans from banks, which typically come with no interest charges attached.
