Ian Drysdale’s phone rang at 2 a.m. during the pandemic, and on the other end was a carrier CIO explaining that their office was closed, their check printer was useless, and they had no way to send premium refunds to customers.
That moment, more than any investor pitch or board presentation, explains why One Inc and ManageMy just announced a partnership that quietly reshapes how insurance carriers move money. This isn’t about flashy new apps or AI-powered claims adjusters. It’s about plumbing—the unsexy infrastructure that determines whether a customer gets paid in three days or three weeks.
The Architecture That Almost Didn’t Exist
Here’s what most people don’t understand about insurance: payments are the industry’s most frequent touchpoint with customers. Claims disbursements, premium collections, refunds, transfers to third parties like lienholders and mortgage servicers—this happens thousands of times a day at every major carrier. Yet until recently, most of this traffic flowed through systems designed in the 1990s, when instantaneity was a nice-to-have, not a business requirement.
One Inc built ClaimsPay and PremiumPay—networks that are literally purpose-built for insurance’s gnarliest payment problem: multi-party transactions. A homeowner files a claim on a house with a mortgage. That payout can’t just go to the customer. It has to split between the homeowner, the lender, and sometimes a contractor. Traditional payment rails choke on this complexity. One Inc’s network doesn’t.
ManageMy, meanwhile, has built the front end that carriers actually use every day—the platform where underwriters, claims adjusters, and customer service reps live. It’s the interface between the carrier’s legacy systems and the actual business of insurance.
Separately, each company solves half a problem. Together, they’re solving the whole thing.
Why Speed Has Become a Retention Weapon
According to one of One Inc CEO Ian Drysdale’s own analyses, the insurance industry’s relationship with payments transformed almost overnight around 2020. And not because of innovation—because of necessity.
“First, insurance payments quickly became strategic starting in 2020 when printing checks from an office was no longer feasible. Second, boards and CEOs started viewing payments as an efficiency multiplier as well as a customer-experience and generational requirement.”
That’s the real inflection point nobody talks about. Before 2020, payment speed was a feature. After 2020, it became a proxy for trust. Customers who got their claims paid in three days renewed. Customers who waited three weeks didn’t.
This partnership gives ManageMy users access to digital wallets, instant payments, virtual cards, and immediate fund transfers. But here’s the thing—the technology part isn’t actually hard anymore. What’s hard is integrating it into an ecosystem where legacy systems, regulatory requirements, and institutional inertia all resist change.
The Competitive Moat in a Carrier’s Blind Spot
Most insurance executives, if you ask them, will talk about AI underwriting. They’ll talk about real-time risk assessment and predictive models. They’ll talk about anything except payments, which they view as a back-office function.
That’s the misconception this partnership is designed to exploit. And exploit might be the right word.
Stuart Johnston, ManageMy’s CRO, said it plainly: the payment experience can make the difference between retaining or losing a customer. Not the claims experience. Not the onboarding experience. The payment experience. Because that’s when money actually changes hands—when the abstract contract becomes real.
If you’re a smaller regional carrier, you can’t build this infrastructure yourself. It requires both the carrier-specific payment network expertise (One Inc’s domain) and the digital-first platform architecture (ManageMy’s domain). If you’re a larger carrier, you’ve probably already built something similar, but it’s brittle, expensive to maintain, and about five years behind modern standards.
For ManageMy’s customers—and that’s the key audience here—this partnership suddenly makes their platform more competitive without requiring those customers to undergo another painful integration project. That’s how you win market share in enterprise software.
The Five-Year Narrative That Matters
Drysdale wrote something interesting in a PYMNTS eBook: over the past five years, insurance evolved from paper-based processes to a digitally connected ecosystem where “payments, digitalization and connectivity define competitive advantage.”
That’s not hyperbole. It’s observable fact. Carriers that moved fast on digital payments between 2020 and 2025 are retaining customers better, processing claims faster, and—this matters to their boards—reducing operational costs. Carriers that dragged their feet are still fighting internal resistance to check deprecation.
This partnership is a forcing function. It says to every ManageMy customer: you can now move fast on digital payments without rearchitecting your entire operation. That’s a significant lever.
But here’s where I push back slightly on the narrative both companies are selling. This isn’t revolutionary. It’s not even new. What’s new is that it’s finally becoming standard. Stripe partnered with insurance companies on payments years ago. Billtrust and other fintech platforms have been trying to solve this problem from different angles.
What One Inc and ManageMy have is distribution and entrenchment. ManageMy’s installed base means thousands of carriers get access to this overnight. That’s valuable. But it’s not technological innovation—it’s organizational consolidation.
The Real Test Ahead
This works if ManageMy adoption stays strong and One Inc’s network can actually handle scale. Both are reasonable assumptions, but worth watching. If carriers start reporting faster claim payouts and better retention metrics in the next two quarters, this becomes a legitimately important shift in how insurance operates. If adoption stalls or integration problems emerge, it’s just another partnership announcement.
The deeper question: how many more infrastructure gaps like this exist in insurance, waiting for someone bold enough to wire them together? This partnership suggests the answer is “at least a few more.” And that’s where the real consolidation of insurance fintech will happen—not in flashy new products, but in ruthlessly efficient plumbing.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does One Inc’s ClaimsPay and PremiumPay network actually do?
They enable insurance-native digital payments that handle multi-party transactions—like splitting a claim payout between a homeowner, a lender, and a contractor. Traditional payment networks weren’t designed for this complexity.
How will this partnership affect insurance customers?
If you use an insurer on the ManageMy platform, you should see faster claim disbursements and premium refunds through digital wallets and instant transfers instead of waiting for checks.
Is this a competitive advantage for ManageMy customers?
Yes—at least in the short term. Carriers using ManageMy can now offer modern payment experiences without building their own infrastructure, which is expensive and time-consuming.
