COST’s new client platform powers profit

IN Partnership with

COST Financial Group’s new software platform is empowering the privately owned premium finance companies it manages to increase revenues and enhance the user experience.

FOR OVER three decades, people in the insurance industry have called COST Financial Group, Inc. because they want to make more money. COST Financial sets up, manages, and operates insurance premium finance companies owned by insurance agencies, agency groups, insurance companies, wholesalers/MGAs, and others. The COST Program enables clients to earn all of the profits from the premium financing they arrange, with no additional work – by handling backroom, day-to-day duties like licensing, compliance, accounting, and operations – and the profit potential far exceeds any commission or rebate program offered by traditional premium finance companies. Now, on top of a better bottom line, COST has another benefit for its clients – a brand new, state-of-the-art software platform for quoting and loan management that

COST Financial Group, Inc. was founded in 1989 by David E. Gebhardt after decades in the insurance underwriting, wholesaling, and premium finance industries. He recognized that there was an alternative to traditional premium financing – a better way for agencies to deal with it and earn profit from it. The COST Program empowers our clients to put the profit from premium finance where it belongs – in their pockets. Our turnkey program enables clients to take control of the entire premium finance process while COST handles all of the day-to-day backroom work for our clients, including operations, accounting, licensing, customer service, collections, and more.

Find out more

“The goal for us is to make the process of starting your own insurance premium finance company with us as painless and as seamless as possible”

Chris Gebhardt, COST Financial

COST had been using its previous platform for over a decade, and it did the job – but by 2019, the executive team knew that a change was coming. “Our previous platform, while extremely functional, lacked a lot of the more modern features people expect from a software platform in 2023. We needed to have maximum flexibility to incorporate new technologies to better suit our wide variety of clients,” said Gebhardt.

The O’Fallon, Illinois firm, just east of St. Louis, spent all of last year releasing the new platform, to wide praise (and helpful feedback) from existing COST clients. “Just like any other piece of new software, there’s going to be things that pop up and don’t work as you expect,” said Gebhardt. “Until you get it into people’s hands and let them use it, you won’t have that valuable feedback to let you know how people are using it and what can be improved.” While COST was pleased with the reception, “There’s always going to be a user experience that could be made better – no piece of software should ever be considered finished, in my opinion. So this is just the beginning of where we can go with it.”

How is his platform different from that offered by other companies? “One of the things that we really were striving for with this new platform was an enhanced quoting experience, but we understand that all loan management platforms are a means to the same end,” he said. By nature, any loan software is fundamentally similar. “They’re all going to be looking for the same information – policy data, the carrier, all that kind of stuff.” COST wanted to set itself apart.

“We’re obviously not trying to replicate what anybody else has,” said Gebhardt. “What we started with, basically, was a platform that not only is going to be more modern than what we had in look and feel. A big focus for it was ensuring that, while it has all of the bells and whistles we wanted, it’s still easy to understand and easy to use, and we’ve been very pleased by the feedback on it. Additionally, it allows for a lot of things that we can customize – can finely tune for our clients’ special needs.” One of those needs may be integration: getting different platforms to talk to each other.

“One of the big things about this new platform is that we can theoretically integrate with almost anybody”

Chris Gebhardt, COST Financial

There is also better workflow for brokers and how they carry out calculations. “One of the really cool things about the new platform is on the quoting side. It’s very easy not only to generate a quote, but also to generate multiple options for that quote.” He gave the example of a client with a default set-up, nine payments, and a 25 percent down payment.

Looking to the future, Gebhardt sees a lot of companies, especially in the insurtech space, who are starting to get involved in premium financing. “Those insurtech guys are miles and miles ahead from a technology perspective. They’re miles ahead of where the industry is, since insurance is an industry that moves at a glacial pace when it comes to technology,” he said. “These insurtechs are coming in and really disrupting the way insurance is sold. And we feel like we have a platform now that is user-friendly enough to satisfy our agent, MGA, and carrier clients, but advanced enough to enable us work with insurtechs as their interest in premium financing grows. We’re excited about where our new platform can take us.”

COST Financial’s integrate-with-anyone platform

A better way to find better quotes

Published 22 May 2023

Specialty

Best in Insurance

Resources

Risk Management

News

RSS

Sitemap

About us

Conditions of Use

Terms & conditions

People

Specialty

Best in Insurance

Resources

Risk Management

News

RSS

Sitemap

About us

Conditions of Use

Terms & conditions

People

Specialty

Best in Insurance

Resources

Risk Management

News

RSS

Sitemap

About us

Conditions of Use

Terms & conditions

People

helps to streamline the entire process. The chief technology officer at COST, Chris Gebhardt, explains, “The goal for us is to make the process of starting your own insurance premium finance company with us as painless and as seamless as possible, but we also want to make sure that interacting with their premium finance company on a day-to-day basis is also not burdensome for the people actually using it, like CSRs, producers, and the insureds themselves.”

“One of the big things about this new platform is that we can theoretically integrate with almost anybody,” he said. “That means that if somebody on the other side has software that they control or have the ability to modify, they can integrate with us. It’s a very platform-neutral technology that we’ve implemented, and that’s something that our clients, especially higher-volume guys who do tons and tons of quotes, are looking to take advantage of. They don’t want to have to do double data entry.”

Additionally, the new COST platform can demonstrate how to further increase profits from premium finance by proactively suggesting loan terms that can maximize revenue without a need to increase the APR charged on a loan. Gebhardt explains, “This is something that we’re really excited about – giving our clients the power to see what the revenue potential on a given loan is and at a glance providing alternative terms to increase that amount.” What also sets the platform apart is that it is more streamlined and using more modern programming language. “It’s branded in a way that is much more personalized, much more customized for each individual client,” he explained. “Things like colors and logos we can now integrate for login screens, so that clients are not logging into a generic-looking website.” These may appear to be small things, but “when you add them all up, it really enhances not only the experience for our users, but also for their insured clients.”

Operations

Accounting

Licensing

Technology

Customer Services

Collections

How can COST Financial help?

Meet COST Financial's executive team

David E. Gebhardt

Travis Klingler

Chris Gebhard

Chairman, chief executive officer

Executive vice president, chief financial officer

Chief technology officer