Buying insurance online increasingly looks less like filling out a traditional financial-services form and more like checking out from an e-commerce site.
PGA Insurance has integrated AsiaPay’s PesoPay payment gateway into its online booking engine, allowing policyholders to pay for insurance using cards, e-wallets, internet banking and installment options from a web-connected device.
The integration, announced August 25, is designed to automate upfront payments made during online insurance purchases while giving PGA Insurance a single system for monitoring transactions, reconciliation and payment disputes.
But the development points to a broader challenge for digital insurance: putting a policy online is only part of making insurance easier to buy.
Insurance needs a checkout experience too
Insurers have spent years moving product discovery, quotations and policy applications online. The transaction still risks becoming cumbersome, however, if customers reach the payment stage and find limited options or have to move between different systems.
PGA Insurance’s PesoPay integration attempts to bring that last part of the purchase closer to the checkout experience consumers already encounter in online retail.
Instead of relying on one payment method, customers can select among several digital channels within the purchasing process.
For an insurer, supporting more payment options can also reduce the chance that a customer who has already decided to buy a policy abandons the transaction because their preferred payment method is unavailable.
The companies did not disclose transaction volumes or targets for the integration.
The change also happens behind the checkout screen
For PGA Insurance, the project is not only about giving customers more payment buttons.
AsiaPay Associate Director Michael Emaas said the unified system allows payment details to be validated without employees switching between multiple consoles, potentially reducing manual work in collections and customer service.
PGA Insurance President Anthony G. Sy similarly said consolidating transaction pipelines into a single dashboard is intended to simplify reconciliation and dispute management.
That back-office layer is less visible to customers, but it becomes increasingly important as insurers accept payments across more channels.
Cards, online banking and e-wallets can each generate separate transaction records and payment issues. Bringing them into one gateway can make it easier for an insurer to determine whether an order was successfully paid and deal with discrepancies when they occur.
Digital insurance is becoming a payments problem too
The Philippine insurance industry’s digital transformation has increasingly focused on making policies accessible through apps, websites, banks and other digital platforms.
Payments are another part of that shift.
A consumer may now be able to discover an insurance product and complete an application without visiting a branch. For that experience to remain fully digital, however, payment and confirmation also need to happen with as little friction as possible.
PGA Insurance, which offers products including motor, personal accident, casualty, aviation and marine insurance, serves more than 630,000 clients nationwide, according to the company announcement.
Its PesoPay integration shows how the next stage of insurance digitalization may be less about simply putting products online and more about making the entire purchase process work like the digital services customers already use every day.
