The Insurance Payment Problem
Insurance platforms handle some of the most complex payment flows in financial services. Premium collection — initial and renewal. Claims payouts. Refunds. Mid-term adjustments. Multi-currency for international policies. Recurring billing across monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles.
And that's just the payment types.
Enterprise insurers don't let the platform choose the PSP. They mandate specific providers by region, product line, or corporate treasury policy. A carrier writing commercial property in Germany needs a different payment provider than one writing personal auto in the UK. The platform has to support both.
Building this in-house is a massive undertaking for a company focused on insurance workflow, not payments. Yet every insurance platform eventually hits the same wall: payments are unavoidable, and the complexity is brutal.
The result is a familiar pattern. Engineering teams spend quarters integrating a single PSP. A new carrier signs and demands a different one. PCI compliance costs balloon. Phone-based premium collection requires an entirely separate payment architecture. And the product roadmap — the thing that actually differentiates the platform — stalls.
Insurance platforms exist to transform how policies are created, distributed, and managed. They should not be spending $2M and 12 months becoming payment companies.
Why Insurance Is Different
Most payment infrastructure is designed for e-commerce. Fixed amounts, single currencies, card-not-present transactions through a web checkout. Insurance breaks every one of those assumptions.
Regulatory Complexity on Top of PCI
Insurance is already one of the most heavily regulated industries globally. Add PCI DSS compliance for payment handling and the burden compounds. Insurance platforms must satisfy both their industry regulators and payment security standards — simultaneously. A PCI breach in an insurance context doesn't just trigger fines. It triggers regulatory scrutiny from insurance authorities, potential licence reviews, and reputational damage in an industry built on trust.
Wildly Variable Transaction Amounts
A pet insurance premium might be £8/month. A commercial property policy could be £500,000 annually. The same platform processes both. Payment infrastructure needs to handle micropayments and high-value transactions with equal reliability — and enterprise carriers expect different authorisation flows, fraud checks, and settlement timelines depending on the amount.
Multi-Channel Payment Capture
Insurance payment moments happen everywhere:
Online — new policy purchase through a web portal
Phone — renewals, claims adjustments, policy changes handled by agents
Agent-assisted — complex commercial products where a broker walks the customer through payment
Automated — recurring premium collection via direct debit or stored card
SMS/email — renewal reminders with embedded payment links
Each channel has different PCI implications. Phone payments alone require DTMF suppression, call recording exclusion, and real-time agent status — an entirely separate technical challenge from web checkout.
Enterprise PSP Mandates
This is the deal-breaker most platforms don't see coming.
When INSTANDA-class platforms sell to enterprise carriers, those carriers arrive with mandated PSPs. The carrier's treasury team has negotiated rates with Worldpay. Their European operations run through Adyen. Their US book uses a different acquirer entirely.
The carrier isn't switching PSPs to use your platform. Your platform has to support their PSPs.
One carrier means one PSP integration. Three carriers across two regions means five or six. Scale that to a platform serving dozens of carriers globally, and the integration burden becomes untenable.
The INSTANDA Approach
INSTANDA is a no-code insurance platform that enables carriers and MGAs to build, configure, and launch insurance products without writing code. Policy administration, underwriting workflows, claims management, distribution — all handled within the platform.
But insurance products need to collect money.
Every policy INSTANDA's customers create needs premium collection. Every renewal cycle needs automated billing. Every claims adjustment may trigger a refund. And every carrier using the platform has their own PSP relationships and compliance requirements.
INSTANDA faced a choice every insurance platform eventually confronts:
Build payment integrations themselves — consuming engineering capacity, taking on PCI scope, and maintaining each PSP connection as APIs change
Lock into a single PSP — fast to implement but immediately limiting when a carrier demands something else
Use a dedicated payment layer that abstracts PSP complexity away from the platform
They chose option 3. INSTANDA embedded Shuttle as their payment infrastructure layer.
The result:
Carriers bring their own PSP. INSTANDA doesn't dictate payment providers. Each carrier connects to their preferred gateway through Shuttle's 40+ PSP integrations — without INSTANDA building or maintaining those connections.
PCI compliance is handled. INSTANDA doesn't store, process, or transmit card data. Shuttle carries the PCI DSS Level 1 burden. INSTANDA's scope drops to near-zero.
Payments work across channels. Web checkout for new policies. Payment links for renewals. Voice payments for call centre interactions. One integration covers all channels.
White-label experience. Carriers and policyholders interact with INSTANDA's branded payment experience. Shuttle sits invisibly underneath.
INSTANDA didn't hire a payments team. They didn't spend 12 months building infrastructure. They shipped payment capabilities across their platform in weeks — and every new carrier can bring their own PSP on day one.
What Insurance Platforms Need from Payment Infrastructure
Not every payment solution can handle insurance. Here's what the requirements actually look like.
Multi-PSP Support
Non-negotiable. Enterprise carriers mandate their preferred PSP. A platform that only supports Stripe or only supports Adyen will lose deals the moment a carrier requires something different. Insurance platforms need a single integration that connects to 40+ PSPs — so any carrier's preference is already covered.
White-Label
Insurance carriers and their policyholders should never see the payment infrastructure provider. The checkout, the merchant portal, and the onboarding flow should all carry the platform's branding. Shuttle's white-label architecture means the payment experience looks and feels like a native part of the insurance platform.
Voice Payments
Insurance has massive phone-based payment volume. Agents handle renewals, policy adjustments, claims calls, and complex commercial transactions — all moments where payment capture needs to happen during the conversation, not after it.
PCI-compliant voice payment capture means DTMF tone suppression, clean call recordings, and agent de-scoping. The agent guides the customer through the call. The customer enters card details via keypad. The tones are intercepted within a PCI-certified environment — the agent never hears them. Payment confirmed. Conversation continues.
Without this, insurance contact centres either accept PCI risk (agents hearing card numbers) or break the conversation ("I'll send you a link after the call"). Neither scales. For a comprehensive overview of voice payment models, see What Are Voice Payments? The Complete Guide. For how AI voice agents are automating this in regulated industries, see AI Voice Agents and Payments: The PolyAI Deep Dive.
Payment Links
Renewal reminders are a perfect use case for payment links. An SMS or email with a branded link. The policyholder clicks, sees their renewal amount, and pays — via card, digital wallet, or bank transfer. No login required. No app download. Completion rates for well-designed payment links regularly exceed 70%.
This turns a traditionally high-friction renewal process into a single-tap payment.
PCI Compliance Handled
PCI DSS Level 1 compliance costs approximately $2M to achieve and maintain in-house. For an insurance platform, that cost sits on top of existing regulatory compliance obligations. A payment layer that carries PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 certification removes this burden entirely. The platform's PCI scope drops to SAQ-A — the lightest level.
Recurring Payment Support
Premiums are recurring by nature. Monthly, quarterly, annual — the billing cycle varies by product and carrier. The payment layer needs to support tokenised recurring payments, retry logic for failed collections, and flexible scheduling that maps to insurance billing cycles.
Multi-Currency
International insurance programmes and global carriers require multi-currency support. A platform writing policies in GBP, EUR, and USD needs payment infrastructure that handles currency routing to the appropriate PSP and acquirer for each region.
Three Approaches to Payments on Insurance Platforms
1. Build In-House
The platform builds direct integrations to each required PSP, handles PCI compliance, manages merchant onboarding, and maintains each connection as PSP APIs evolve.
Timeline: 12+ months for the first PSP. Months more for each additional one.
Cost: $2M+ for PCI DSS Level 1 compliance alone. Plus engineering salaries, ongoing maintenance, and the opportunity cost of a product team building payment plumbing instead of insurance features.
The real problem: It works for one PSP. Then a second carrier demands a different one. Then a third. Each new PSP is a mini-project. The "build" never finishes — it becomes a permanent drag on the roadmap.
Verdict: Makes sense only if payments are your core business. For insurance platforms, it's a trap.
2. Single PSP Lock-In
The platform integrates with one PSP — Stripe, Adyen, or Worldpay — and standardises all carriers onto it.
Timeline: Weeks to months, depending on complexity.
Cost: Low upfront. High over time.
The real problem: This works until the first enterprise carrier says, "We use [different PSP] and we're not switching." The platform either loses the deal or starts building a second PSP integration — which puts them back in the "build in-house" category.
In insurance, where enterprise carriers have strong PSP relationships tied to treasury operations and corporate banking, this moment comes fast.
Verdict: Fine for early-stage platforms with a small, flexible customer base. Breaks down at enterprise scale.
3. Payment Layer Approach
The platform integrates once with a payment infrastructure layer that connects to 40+ PSPs, handles PCI compliance, and supports all payment channels.
Timeline: Weeks. Single API integration.
Cost: Usage-based. No PCI compliance cost. No per-PSP engineering cost.
The result: Every new carrier's PSP preference is already supported. Voice payments, payment links, and embedded checkout all work through the same integration. PCI scope is near-zero. The platform's engineering team stays focused on insurance.
This is the model INSTANDA chose. It's the model that scales.
Verdict: The only approach that supports multi-PSP, multi-channel, and multi-carrier requirements without consuming the product roadmap.
The Voice Payment Angle
Insurance has a phone problem. Or more accurately, insurance has a phone payment problem.
Consider the volume of insurance interactions that happen over the phone:
Claims calls — a policyholder reports a claim and needs to pay an excess
Renewal calls — customer calls to discuss renewal terms and pays the premium
Policy adjustments — mid-term changes that require additional premium collection or a partial refund
Broker-assisted sales — complex commercial products where the broker walks the customer through coverage and collects payment at the end
Every one of these is a moment where payment capture should happen during the conversation. Not after. Not via a follow-up email. During the call, while the customer is engaged and the transaction context is clear.
The PCI challenge is real. If an agent hears a card number, the entire telephony environment is in PCI scope — call recordings, agent workstations, network infrastructure, CRM systems. The compliance cost is enormous.
PCI-compliant voice payment capture solves this. The customer enters card details via keypad. DTMF tones are intercepted within a PCI-certified environment. The agent stays on the line but hears masking tones instead of card numbers. Payment is processed. A confirmation is returned. The call recording is clean.
Shuttle Voice Checkout supports 16+ payment gateways via voice channel, with DTMF suppression, real-time agent status, and SMS payment link fallback (for customers who prefer not to use the keypad). It works with existing telephony — Twilio, SIP-based carriers, and major CCaaS platforms.
For insurance platforms, this means phone-based premium collection, claims excess payments, and broker-assisted transactions can all be PCI-compliant without a separate payment integration per channel.
Implementation: What It Looks Like
Insurance platforms evaluating payment infrastructure want to know what integration actually involves. Here's the practical picture.
Single API Integration
One integration to Shuttle's API. This connects the platform to 40+ PSPs across all payment channels — embedded checkout, voice, payment links. There is no per-PSP integration work. Adding a new PSP for a new carrier is a configuration change, not an engineering project.
PSP Configuration Per Carrier
Each carrier on the platform can be mapped to their required PSP. Carrier A uses Worldpay in the UK. Carrier B uses Adyen across Europe. Carrier C uses a regional acquirer in APAC. All configured within Shuttle — not hard-coded in the platform.
White-Label Checkout
The payment experience carries the platform's branding. Policyholders see the insurance platform's logo, colours, and domain. Shuttle is invisible.
Merchant Onboarding Automation
When a new carrier or MGA joins the platform, their PSP account setup and configuration can be automated through Shuttle's merchant management layer. No manual provisioning per carrier.
Compliance Included
PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider. ISO 27001. SOC 2. The platform inherits Shuttle's compliance certifications. No separate PCI audit. No additional security infrastructure. The platform's PCI scope is minimal — SAQ-A level.
Go-Live Timeline
Weeks, not months. Insurance platforms that have integrated Shuttle have gone from first API call to live payment processing in a matter of weeks. Compare that to the 12+ months a typical in-house build requires.
Conclusion
Insurance platforms exist to modernise how policies are built, distributed, and managed. Payments are essential to that mission — but building payment infrastructure is not.
The complexity is real: multi-PSP mandates from enterprise carriers, multi-channel payment capture across web and phone, PCI compliance on top of existing regulatory obligations, and wildly variable transaction types from £8 monthly premiums to six-figure commercial policies.
Platforms that try to build this in-house spend 12+ months and $2M+ on PCI compliance alone — and still end up locked into one or two PSPs. Platforms that lock into a single provider lose enterprise deals the moment a carrier demands something different.
The payment layer approach — a single integration to infrastructure that handles PSP routing, PCI compliance, and multi-channel payment capture — is how INSTANDA-class platforms solve this. One integration. 40+ PSPs. Every channel covered. Compliance included.
If your insurance platform is evaluating payment infrastructure, talk to Shuttle.
[Book a Call] | [See How It Works]