How payments are reshaping the insurance industry – a practitioner’s view
We had the privilege of discussing with Alexandru Lascu, Risk & Insurance Director at UiPath, the challenges faced by the insurance industry and the evolving role of automation in addressing them.
Alexandru has spent his entire professional career in insurance and brings a practitioner’s perspective shaped by years of working closely with insurers across different markets. Our conversation explored the areas where automation has already delivered meaningful progress, as well as those where significant potential still remains untapped, like modern payment infrastructure.
Alexandru`s view on the limits of claims automation
FinsurtechAI: Alexandru, for the last 16 years, you have sat on both sides of the table, working for insurers where you have held underwriting and claims management roles, as well as leading corporate risk management and insurance benefits functions as a client. In your experience, which areas have seen the greatest progress in automation, and which remain difficult to automate?
Alexandru: In recent years, the industry has made substantial progress in automating and agentifying claims management to address long-standing pain points. Many insurers and large corporates have invested in digital First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and intake, workflow and rules automation, and improved triage and oversight.
These efforts have created tangible value with faster cycle times for many types of claims, better documentation quality and auditability and stronger governance and visibility for internal stakeholders.
But in many organisations, automation still stops just before money moves.
Once a claim is agreed in principle and an amount is approved, the process frequently reverts to manual handoffs between claims and finance or treasury, batch payment runs over legacy banking rails and fragmented reconciliation across multiple systems, spreadsheets, and intermediaries.
In other words, increasingly intelligent claims workflows frequently feed into relatively unintelligent payment processes.
The next phase of progress in claims management is unlikely to come from incremental improvements in intake or workflow alone, but rather from treating the payment and reconciliation stage as an integral, data-rich part of the claims process and from connecting modern automation with insurance‑native payment rails and intelligence.
Claims payments – a source of friction
FinsurtechAI: That is how we see it as well. Shall we zoom in on the points where automated claims workflows encounter friction with payment execution?
Alexandru: Across the ecosystem, stakeholders encounter similar friction at the point where automated claims workflows meet payment execution. Whether viewed from the perspective of a corporate risk manager closing the books, a broker keeping a client informed, a Third Party Administrator (TPA) handling funds, or an insurer managing loss ratios and regulatory scrutiny, the same “last‑mile” issues emerge.
First, we see regular delays between decision and payment – claims approves the indemnity and then hands over to finance. There are additional checks happening in claims and batch processing.
Second, stakeholders in the company have limited real-time visibility into where money actually sits – with the company in treasury, or with the TPA?
Reconciliation burden introduces operational risk and consumes time and resources. For most insurers, it is still difficult to link each payment cleanly back to a specific claim, coverage, and vendor.
The opportunity – an insurance-native payments layer
FinsurtechAI: These are more than minor operational irritants. Claims decisions have become faster and more consistent, but the downstream flow of those decisions into payments, and the return of payment data into claims, finance, and risk processes, has not received the same level of attention.
Alexandru: Exactly, and this is why I believe that the next wave of transformation will need to focus on this shared pain point. Connecting automated claims workflows with an insurance‑native payments layer does not simply address a back‑office annoyance; it unlocks value for every participant in the chain.
First and foremost, clients will benefit from faster, clearer outcomes. Brokers and TPAs will benefit from reduced operational friction and compliance exposure. For insurer, this will translate into better control over leakage, provider networks, and claims inflation.
The struggles are similar across stakeholders because the underlying gap is the same. The opportunity to address it is, therefore, also shared.
Beyond claims – premium reconciliation issues
FinsurtechAI: When we discussed with several COOs, CFOs, and Chief Claims Officers, our initial idea was to focus exclusively on claims. However, many C-suite executives are still facing problems with premiums reconciliation. You came across several existing payment systems in insurance. What is your experience?
Alexandru: Finance teams across insurers and intermediaries regularly encounter structural friction in premium collection and reconciliation flows.
Broker remittances are frequently received net of commissions and discretionary discounts, without the line-level detail needed to reconcile what was expected against what was received.
Aggregated payments prevent policy-level allocation, creating reconciliation backlogs that consume significant finance operations resource. Undocumented discounts and commission deductions create compliance risk and limited visibility into whether broker authority limits are being respected.
On the other hand, delays in commission payments create incentives for brokers to net premiums rather than remit gross, further complicating reconciliation
These are not edge cases. They are systemic features of how premium flows are managed across much of the market, and they represent a meaningful source of revenue leakage and operational cost that has received insufficient attention.
Structural constraints in claims payments
FinsurtechAI: What are the typical structural constraints you have seen when it comes to payment systems in claims?
Alexandru: On the claims side the payment infrastructure often remains misaligned with how modern insurance is expected to function.
Decisions are made in claims systems and then “dropped” into legacy payment processes that were never designed for multi-line, multi-country, multi-party insurance ecosystems
Insurers continue to rely on payment rails and formats that provide limited remittance information and almost no structured, line-level data that can be fed back into pricing, reserving, or vendor management
A high degree of fragmentation persists: brokers, TPAs, Managing General Agents (MGAs), and various internal functions each hold pieces of the process and fragments of the data
This misalignment means difficulty to obtain a clean, near real-time view of who has actually been paid, on which claim, under which policy, and through which intermediary.
We see claims leakage and operational noise that stem not from underwriting or claims decisions, but from over- or duplicate payments, slow reconciliations, and weak controls in the payout chain.
These limitations reflect on the analytics side for providers and pricing, as critical data is often trapped in payment systems that were never built to support insurance analytics. And that affects profitability, operational efficiency, compliance and governance.
Across the ecosystem, insurers, brokers, and TPAs frequently attempt to “bridge the gap” with spreadsheets, bespoke reports, and manual checks. The underlying issue, however, is architectural: a real-time, data-driven insurance business is being run on top of generic payment rails that do not understand insurance workflows, regulations, or the need for claims-level intelligence.
How end consumers and suppliers are affected by slow payments
FinsurtechAI: The end consumers are affected as well, as shortcomings in insurance payment processes appear in concrete, repeatable ways across lines of business and stakeholder groups. Can you give some examples from your experience?
Alexandru: For sure, for example, in travel or health insurance, employees pay out of pocket for medical expenses and then enter a slow, paperwork-heavy reimbursement process. In the case of employee benefits policies, risk and human resources teams are spending time on ad hoc approvals for routine, covered situations
Many assistance providers and insurers still rely on traditional payment methods that do not align with the “real-time” expectations created by digital intake and assistance services
The result is avoidable back-and-forth communication, uncertainty around reimbursement timing, and limited structured data on where and how medical spend occurs.
In Property and Casualty, where you can deal with multiple vendors per claim (repairs, towing, remediation, contractors) with different invoicing and payment timelines, the operational friction is more visible.
Payments are initiated in systems separate from those used to manage the claim, leading to manual tracking and reconciliation. It is usually difficult to get a consolidated, up-to-date view of total claim spend by vendor or asset, leaving cost benchmarking and leakage detection dependent on periodic manual reviews
In practice, this results in delays in settlement to smaller vendors, additional rental or storage days, and more time spent aligning claims, accounts payable, and TPA/carrier data.
Payments in commercial insurance and multi-stakeholders cases
FinsurtechAI: What about commercial insurance and financial lines? There we speak about large claims and complex situations, with multiple stakeholders involved (insurers, brokers, loss assessors, lawyers, experts)?
Alexandru: For financial lines, complexity is higher, but the nature of the pain is similar. Large claims involve multiple specialist vendors, each with separate billing and payment channels. Approvals and cost allocations need to be precise (e.g., by policy, coverage section, and cost category), but payments often lack that level of structured tagging. Building a single, near-real-time picture of total spend on a specific case requires manual consolidation across internal systems and insurer reports.
This creates additional work for risk, legal, and finance teams and makes proactive cost management more difficult than necessary.
To summarize, while claims decisioning and governance have advanced, payment and reconciliation processes remain fragmented and lightly instrumented, causing routine delays, additional manual work, and limited use of payment data in decision‑making.
What pain points should a modern insurance payments system address?
FinsurtechAI: Our industry is lagging behind others in terms of payment infrastructure, but there are solutions to close the gaps. In your opinion, what shall we consider when developing modern payment systems?
Alexandru: The most effective solutions are those that address day-to-day frictions without requiring wholesale change to existing structures or responsibilities. Payment‑intelligent and AI-enabled tools can contribute in several practical ways.
First, the ideal platform should ensure a smoother handoff from “approved claim” to paid claim. In many organisations, claim approval does not automatically translate into a straightforward payment process; emails, spreadsheets, and manual steps remain common.
A more efficient approach is for claims and related systems to generate a clear, structured instruction once a claim is agreed, specifying who should be paid, the amount and the associated claim and policy data.
Payment orchestration platforms can then receive that instruction and handle execution end-to-end, routing the payment, applying predefined controls, and feeding structured payment data back into claims, finance, and analytics workflows.
Solutions such as Finsurtech.ai illustrate how this type of orchestration layer can connect automated claims workflows with modern payment rails and structured financial intelligence.
Another important part is to embed effective controls into how payments are executed. Most controls currently live in policies and procedures rather than in the payment execution itself.
A more practical setup is to define basic parameters upfront—such as budget limits for a vendor on a claim, time windows, and allowed use—and rely on the payment layer to apply these rules automatically whenever funds move. This shifts effort from post-event checking to preventing most issues at the point of payment, with human attention focused on genuine exceptions.
Modern payments systems – a source of insight
FinsurtechAI: We also see a big potential in a data-rich payment orchestration layer to improve analytics across the value chain – from provider management to pricing and underwriting decisions.
Alexandru: Absolutely. Stakeholders need straightforward answers to simple questions, such as the typical time from approval to payment, total spend with a given provider across all claims over a defined period or obvious outliers in cost or speed.
A payments‑intelligence platform can capture this information as part of the normal process and present it in a format that stakeholders can quickly interpret and act on.
This supports renewals, provider reviews, budgeting, and internal reporting without creating additional reporting burdens.
Modern payments infrastructure as a capital optimisation tool
FinsurtechAI: We have spoken with several CFOs about the capital “trapped” in pre-funded claims accounts and manual reconciliations are frequent sources of operational noise. We firmly believe that real-time, intelligent payment orchestration can minimise buffers and pre-funding.
Alexandru: This is one of the most important ideas you have introduced with your white paper on “How VCNs are transforming the claims payments”. Funds can be used when needed rather than parked in larger pools, and matching payments to claims can be largely automated, as all the relevant information is attached from the outset. This leads to clearer visibility on outstanding exposures and a cleaner financial close.
Another important point: insurers, brokers, TPAs, and corporates often work from slightly different numbers and timelines, and alignment requires effort.
There is clear value in having a single, consistent view of payments linked to each claim that all parties can reference. A platform such as yours can act as that shared reference point for the financial side of the claims process, complementing existing systems and AI automation solutions rather than replacing them. This reduces back‑and‑forth effort required to confirm “who was paid what, and when” and supports more collaborative, data-driven discussions about claims performance and cost.
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