Merchants today must constantly adapt to the ever-changing global payments acceptance environment. Which is why, when one insurance company determined it was time to modernize its payments operations, they sought the expertise of Glenbrook’s consulting team. Glenbrook Partners has a broad perspective on the changes happening in consumer and business payments preferences, third party solution provider capabilities, ecosystem economics, and demographic and geographic trends. The Glenbrook team leveraged its expertise to help the insurance company create a more efficient and cost-effective payments operation.
Situation
Like many large insurance companies with complex, multi-faceted payments operations and technologies, the client knew there was opportunity for improvement. Specifically, they were focused on the following key operational components:
- Better management of provider service agreements and overall acceptance costs
- Enhancing existing platform architecture to drive increased flexibility
- Establishing measurable KPIs to track overall health of the business and vendor performance
Having worked with a significant number of merchants and global payments organizations since 2001, Glenbrook has a solid track record of helping businesses navigate strategic, operational, and organizational related challenges. In this case, Glenbrook guided the client toward improvements that ultimately lowered costs and led to an RFP for a payments provider that was better suited to the insurance company’s operations.
Having worked with a significant number of merchants and global payments organizations since 2001, Glenbrook has a solid track record of helping businesses navigate strategic, operational, and organizational related challenges. In this case, Glenbrook guided the client toward improvements that ultimately lowered costs and led to an RFP for a payments provider that was better suited to the insurance company’s operations.
Approach
To establish a baseline understanding of the unique characteristics of the business, Glenbrook reviewed the insurance company’s architecture diagrams, operational dashboards, reports, strategy, product roadmaps, and other resources that demonstrated how the business was operating. The operational assessment continued by holding detailed interviews with stakeholders across the client’s organization to discuss operational processes, identify challenges and pain points, and establish historical decision making context in order to inform which ongoing practices were favorable to the organization as well as potential areas of concern.
Glenbrook was able to provide a detailed set of recommendations that addressed the organization’s challenges and pain points. For example, to reduce fraud losses and identify cost abnormalities, Glenbrook recommended developing more actionable, operational dashboards. To optimize card acceptance costs, Glenbrook provided process and service improvements such as chargeback handling, transaction routing decisions, and network token guidance.
Impact
Glenbrook Partners developed a payments strategy that unified the company’s platform, streamlined international operations, centralized reporting, and future-proofed its payments architecture.
Armed with a new set of measurable payments KPIs and an enhancements roadmap from Glenbrook, the insurance company will be able to better expand its product and service offerings, implement new go-to-market strategies, enable new payment types, and add new customer use cases.
Glenbrook’s recommendations also led to the organization launching
an RFP to identify a new processing partner that will ultimately help
them streamline oversight of multiple processes and lower overall
costs for payment processing.
Client Perspective
“We’ve been working with Glenbrook since 2018, and we couldn’t be happier with our relationship. Glenbrook is a payments industry expert. The team’s knowledge is unparalleled. They were immediately able to identify what our business challenges were and had several recommendations for how we could improve. We had some pretty unique issues. Glenbrook applied its framework, but they know that it’s not one-size-fits all. They adapted it to meet our needs, and we’re still working with them today on some of the improvements they suggested. It is safe to say that Glenbrook has become a trusted payments advisor to our organization!”
