The Company

The insurance industry is known for being highly fragmented, with different providers and policies spread across multiple platforms. While the insurtech community addresses this issue with new ways to improve end-customer experiences, not much has been done to update the infrastructure upon which the entire industry operates. Enter Ascend—a modern insurance payments platform founded with a mission to simplify complex financial infrastructures while making it easier for people to protect the things they care about.

Ascend’s holistic approach and innovative products automate insurance payment workflows for agencies, wholesalers, and carriers,  addressing a massive source of inefficiency across the industry. Their main mission is to modernize accounts receivables and payables for all parts of the insurance chain; with workflows that specifically address friction points in: invoicing, premium financing, commissions, and carrier payables.

With Ascend, insurance companies get an all-in-one online solution that mitigates tedious work while also reducing their operational overhead.

The Problem

Many brokerages using Ascend want to offer their clients premium financing on their policies. Offering this kind of financing helps brokerages sell more policies and also opens up an additional revenue stream for them.

Like any loan program, premium financing is highly regulated and involves many forms mandated by compliance standards. Because premium financing is particularly complex due to variability in loan terms due to risks associated with different coverage types, the back and forth required to get approvals and sign financing agreements can be prohibitive. A broker might spend many hours each week chasing down financing agreements rather than selling new policies or managing their renewals.

Ascend wanted to make it easier for agents to offer premium financing to their clients in a way that significantly reduced the typical friction of completing the agreements.

The Solution

With the help of Anvil’s PDF Filling API, Ascend has automated the ability for agencies to automatically generate premium finance agreements and for their clients to electronically sign these agreements all within the checkout experience. Once signed, the agreement is electronically delivered to the customer - all without the agency having to intervene.

To collect those regular premium payments, agents also use Ascend’s all-in-one payments platform to send invoices. Ascend leverages Anvil’s PDF generation API to prepare invoices with all necessary policy and installment details and then automatically emails the invoices to the clients for payment.

This end-to-end flow has eliminated the need for manual intervention by insurance agencies, reduced the administrative burden on both agents and customers, and provided a seamless and efficient experience that saves time and money.

The Result

With the help of Anvil, Ascend has automated tens of thousands of PDF files along with e-signature collections for their customers each month. This has saved their agencies a significant amount of time. Rather than going through the multi-step process of manually generating documents, setting up signatures, regenerating agreements when rates are negotiated, and chasing down signatures before policies need to go into effect, everything is automated and delivered without any agency intervention.