Ascend's 2022 Yearly Tech Recap

What a year! We wrapped up 2022 with big accomplishments but even bigger ambitions for next year. In just a year, we’ve built a best in class payments platform for our agents that works with existing workflows and increases efficiencies and revenue for our customers.

This resulted in,

• 500+ organizations and thousands of users signing up with Ascend
• Processing transactions of all sizes, with our largest being $6.9m and our smallest just $6
• Growing volume by ~30% month over month

All of these accomplishments were only possible by listening to our customer feedback to mold our product to meet their needs, maximize workflow efficiencies, and increase agency profits.

Out of all our accomplishments this year, we’re most excited about the following launches:

AMS Integrations

We are integrated with the top AMS including NowCerts, HawkSoft, Novidea, Veruna, AMS360, and more to come. This means agents can use their existing workflows in their AMS to easily connect to Ascend to provide the best in class payment experience for their customers.

Flexible Loan Terms

Agents love our integrated pay in full and premium financing checkout experience but wanted additional control on the loan terms offered from our default terms. To meet their needs we:

• Extended the premium financing window to 50 days from policy start date
• Allowed agents to adjust the downpayment or interest rate
• Created the ability to select a loan’s payment schedule (10, 9, 6, 4, or 2-pay)
• Let agents adjust their take-rate from financed policies directly in the dashboard

Client Portal

We launched a single payment portal where insureds can:

• Pay, view, and manage new and existing policies
• Make one off payments for one-time fees
• Pay direct bill carriers

This portal is an easy to use single webpage that customers can handle all their payment issues - reducing the time our agents spend answering payment related questions.

Endorsements, Refunds, Cancellations, Renewals

We built the easiest way to process endorsements, refunds, cancellations, or renewals all within our dashboard. A couple clicks and any adjustments or additions to an existing policy are processed without any additional work. We automatically notify all parties of the status of any policy changes and when premiums are charged or refunded.

Accounting Reports

Ascend not only aims to help producers and account managers, but also finance and accounting teams. We built an accounting dashboard to help bookkeepers with reconciliation. Accountants can easily download and access all the payment details and statuses for policies processes through Ascend.

What’s in store for 2023?

This is just the tip of the iceberg for us! Looking forward, we are working on tackling some of the biggest problems for Ascend users - making payables even more seamless and simplifying the reconciliation process - continuing towards our goal of being the best payments solution for insurance agents.

On the horizon, we’re also looking to modernize not only the agency bill process, but also the direct bill process for wholesalers, MGAs, etc. Stay tuned for some more exciting news in Q1!

-Team Ascend