How Garantme streamlined the claim payout experience for 80,000 rental properties

Garantme is a comprehensive platform for real estate professionals. Through its guarantor services for tenants, rental insurance and rental management tools for real estate agencies, Garantme streamlines the rental and property management process.

Garantme supports 5,000 partner agencies across 150 cities and its insurance and guarantor services currently cover more than 80,000 rentals.

Payments as core to the policyholder experience

Payments are core to Garantme’s insurance activities. As a broker, Garantme collects premiums from insured customers and disburses claim settlements for covered events. Garantme made claim disbursements a central part of their customer experience.

“Claim management and disbursements are when policyholders experience Garantme's value the most. More than the instantaneity of the claim payout, our customers expect a clear, transparent claim process and detailed tracking of these claims, from the moment a claim is opened to the moment the settlement’s funds reach the beneficiary” says Emile Karam, Garantme's co-founder and Chief Product Officer.

Garantme aims to provide the same level of experience to its partners. As Garantme distributes its insurance products to landlords and tenants through partner real estate agencies, accountants, and managers at these agencies also require real-time visibility and past records on these payment flows to close their books accurately and better manage customer relationships.

The need to streamline claim payouts to support Garantme’s growth

A major complexity of the claim disbursement process lies in all the steps that take place before the claim payout is initiated. First, the validity of the claim is checked, and then the amount and beneficiary of the claim payment are validated. Once these tasks are completed, the payment orders are sent to the bank.

With Garantme’s growth, the number of policyholders and, therefore, claims increased over the years. The manual workflow they relied on to validate and initiate claim payouts was not scalable, as it took too much time from Garantme’s operations team and led to too many payment errors. 

Garantme also sent manually generated payment files to its bank, which introduced the potential for errors at this step and prevented an automated tracking of payment statuses.

To provide a better experience to their policyholders and partner real-estate agencies and optimise internal operations, Garantme chose Numeral as their payment operations solution, on which they could build a robust claim payouts workflow because it could integrate with their existing partner bank.

Saving 60 hours per month to Garantme’s finance and operations team

Garantme deeply integrated Numeral with their back-office system leveraging Numeral’s APIs and webhooks.

After a claim is validated, a payment order request is automatically generated. Garantme operations team can validate or edit the request and its payment details or escalate the validation, if required, before approving the payment. Every evening, all validated payments are automatically sent to the bank.

After the bank processes the payments, Numeral automatically retrieves and updates their status so Garantme’s team can visualise in their back-office system if claim payouts have been successful or if errors need to be fixed. This information is also displayed for real estate agents, operations, and policyholders in their dedicated interfaces.

“Integrating Numeral greatly benefited both our customers and internal teams. With Numeral, Garantme now delivers on our commitment: offer reliable, fast and transparent claim payouts to our customers. Numeral also greatly improved our operations, saving 3 hours per day for our finance and operations teams,” says Emile Karam, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Garantme.

In addition to streamlining the claim payout workflow, Garantme also leverages Numeral to automate claim payout reconciliations where before Numeral, Garantme’s finance team had to manually record payment statuses in their accounting tool.

Looking ahead: optimising more payment flows with Numeral

Looking forward, Garantme wants to expand the use cases it covers for real estate agents by enabling them to collect rent payments via the Garantme platform with the same level of user experience and automation.

In payments specifically, Garantme plans to expand the scope of Numeral to more payment flows, starting with account payables payments and replacing part of their treasury management system.