In his fascinating talk with BNY Merllon’s Michelle Palombo the AFP Annual conference, Jeff Paradis described why they decided to accept insurance premium payments by mobile. It fitted with their payment strategy: 1) making it easy to do business with Safety, 2) offer a flexible range of options, and 3) ‘e’ wherever possible. Furthermore, in the highly competitive insurance industry customers move from web-site to web-site to find the best and easiest site to apply for an offer.

 In their talk, entitled ‘Mobile payments and more using “on the go” technology to connect with customers and facilitate financial processes”, Jeff and Michelle described the burgeoning demand for mobile with numbers from Gartner and Aite. These are huge, but what was really impressive was Jeff’s answer to the question “How did you calculate the costs/transaction?” when the replied “We didn’t really focus on the cost. We realised that we had to offer payment by mobile, because it is the way our customers want to do business with us.”

Safety also gained a competitive advantage over their competitors by being first to offer payment by mobile and being able to use their App on the iPhone to promote the Safety Insurance brand. The App can also be used to report an accident. Also they have found that mobile is particularly useful for collecting late premiums.

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This case study is an excellent example of how mobile offers the potential to integrate payments with service and marketing to gain competitive advantage. Ignore the mobile payments opportunity at your peril.