BIIA Insurance Cut Transaction Costs Nearly 50% by Rethinking Insurance Payment Processing

Founded in 1999, Builders Insurance Industry Association (BIIA) Insurance is a fully licensed property and casualty insurance company serving Virginia businesses with compensation coverage, general liability, and commercial auto. BIIA started with a focus on the home building industry and has since expanded to serve a wide range of business professionals.

As the company grew, so did the effort behind every bill. Customers had many disparate ways to pay: mailing in a check, faxing a form with credit card details, or calling in to pay over the phone. Each of those methods required extra time and manual effort from customers and BIIA employees alike. Manual billing took significant staff time, and as the customer base kept expanding, it became unsustainable.

BIIA's first move toward digital was to offer online payments by credit card. That fixed one problem and created another. Every time a customer paid by card, BIIA was subject to fixed and variable credit card fees, new costs that dramatically impacted the bottom line. Slow payment processing still led to delays and frustrated customers, and the accounting team faced ongoing uncertainty about what processing fees would be.

BIIA's accounting team knew what it needed: a way to drive customers to the website for easy payment processing that would reduce time spent by staff, decrease uncertainty around processing fees, and significantly lower transaction costs, with room to scale as the business grew.

BIIA turned to Paystand to deliver a simple payment experience that addressed these challenges within the context of its existing invoicing system. There was no lengthy rollout. In just a matter of days, BIIA installed Paystand's digital payment gateway to enable customer payments on its website.

Once the gateway went live, every payment form, including ACH, credit card, and debit card, could be processed easily and quickly through Paystand's integrated payment gateway. Customers could pay on the website with zero intervention from BIIA staff. The checks, faxes, and phone calls that once needed hands-on handling now had a simpler, self-service alternative.

Cost was the other half of the problem, and Paystand addressed it directly. Lower-fee payment options gave customers a way to pay electronically while bringing BIIA's transaction costs down. For card payments, Paystand's consistent, blended rate gave BIIA instant visibility into fees, replacing uncertainty with a rate the accounting team could count on.