Pekin Insurance Expands Bancassurance to Debt Protection

Meeting Customer Demand

About two years ago, Pekin decided to offer debt protection programs to regional and community banks as well as the credit union industry to retain its leadership in the consumer credit protection market. The company also had customer demand for new offerings and wanted to maintain its current relationships, as well as develop new relationships by providing alternative protection options for borrowers.

“We knew an ideal product would have to share common features with credit insurance, but cover more events than just life and disability,” said Jay Holloman, director of Financial Products, Pekin Insurance. “We wanted to create a fee-based product that provided consistency and ease of understanding for our customers and give us and them the ability to customize programs by geographic regions.”

Lending Knowledge Is Key

As Holloman explained in a recent presentation to the ABIA Annual Conference, the leading event for the banking insurance/bancassurance industry, lending knowledge is essential to rolling out new debt protection programs.

CSC’s William Guthrie, regional vice president in Lending Services who co-presented at the conference, described how CSC advises companies on designing and pricing new programs, as well as providing a debt protection platform. “CSC built the Convenience II system to assess monthly debt protection premiums, which we have deployed for more than two decades as an application service provider, or software as a service as it’s called now.” This approach allows Pekin and its customers and sales partners to achieve fast implementations without a lot of costly modifications to loan systems.

Web-Based Sales Support

In addition to supporting the introduction of new debt protection products at Pekin for accidental death, disability, hospitalization, involuntary unemployment, and family leave protection, CSC provided a program that gives the company Internet access and a user-friendly Website it can customize for the financial services firms selling its products.

“Now Pekin’s clients have a sales tool that quotes and administers the program without modifying banks’ mission-critical core systems,” said John Kilgore, vice president of CSC’s Lending Services Group. “CSC created one of the first debt protection offerings for financial services, and we leverage that experience and knowledge to create successful programs.”

CSC created an interface from Pekin’s familiar Website to the debt protection system, so that a seamless logon launches CSC’s software as a service. Lending professionals at Pekin’s client location can quote debt protection coverage by branch or demographic area online, as well as issue policies, and print addendums and benefit activation forms.

Meeting Clients’ Unique Needs

CSC has also worked with Pekin to provide a variety of management reports, monitor the effectiveness of Pekin’s new program, and help its financial organization clients decide on what key data elements from their loan systems to extract to CSC’s debt protection system.

Get More Information

Learn more about CSC’s debt protection programs at Debt Protection.

Learn more about Pekin’s credit assurance offerings at www.pekininsurance.com.

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