Pet Insurance Platform Digitally Issues Reimbursements

Wagmo is a pet insurance company using account-to-account payments to reimburse policyholders on its platform. Pet parents can get a quote from the website for their dog or cat and, once approved, submit a claim and receive a reimbursement via ACH directly to their bank account.

Wagmo CEO and Co-Founder Christie Horvath unapologetically loves the insurance industry and spent six years working in the traditional insurance space when she faced her own emergency involving her dog Denver, who was suffering from a brain tumor. The experience helped her see a blatant inefficiency in the claim reimbursement process.

“I was filling out a PDF, faxing it back and waiting between four and six weeks just to have a check mailed to me for a reimbursement,” Horvath says. “That blew my mind. I saw first-hand the potential for a great pet insurance product.”

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Joined by Alison Foxworth, Wagmo has closed the gap between what pet owners expect from a pet insurance product and what was available in the market. Today, Wagmo offers pet wellness and insurance plans in all 50 states.

“Our approach has been to put pet parents first and the lynchpin to all of this is our claims process,” Horvath says. “We integrated Dwolla in such a way that our claims system takes only one click to initiate a reimbursement that is delivered to their bank account.”

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Quickly Integrating a Payments Solution

Before going live with Dwolla in 2019, policyholders on the platform were submitting invoices and receiving reimbursements manually from Horvath. The end of every week was spent manually initiating invoices and reimbursements.

“As claim volumes started to increase, we realized how painful this process really was. So we started scrambling to figure out an alternative.”

Horvath started searching for payment providers and tapped into her Techstars network to ask mentors about various payment solutions. All of them came back with the same suggestion: bank transfers work best for reimbursements.

“I kept getting referred to work with my bank,” Horvath says. “But that never really made a ton of sense to me. It was expensive and slow, and not great for a high volume of transfers.”

Horvath needed a payment solution that could easily be integrated and was reasonably priced. Ten days after a kickoff call with Dwolla, Wagmo completed an integration and started offering reimbursements via ACH transactions.

Transaction volumes have increased by 45% over the last 12 months.

“The Dwolla implementation was super easy,” Horvath says. “That’s what we were looking for. We didn’t have the time to do a four-week implementation or custom build. Having Dwolla be pretty much plug-n-play was super important to us.”

1. Transfer Initiated via the Dwolla API to fund Dwolla Master Balance

POST https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/transfers
Accept: application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json
Content-Type: application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json
Authorization: Bearer {{token}}
Idempotency-Key: {{idempotencyKey}}
{
  "_links": {
      "source": {
          "href": "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/funding-sources/{{WagmoBankFundingSourceId}}"
      },
      "destination": {
          "href": "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/funding-sources/{{SellerFundingSourceId}}"
      }
  },
  "amount": {
      "currency": "USD",
      "value": "2000.00"
  },
}
...
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/transfers/{{transferId}}

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Receiving Reimbursements in 1-2 Days

Pet parents can get a quote from Wagmo by entering a few pieces of information about their dog or cat. To submit a claim, Wagmo simply requests an image of the invoice. That data is extracted, classified by the type of procedure and calculated. One click of a button from the Wagmo team will initiate the reimbursement.

“That’s exactly what we wanted, one click and the customer can accept a payment,” Horvath says. “And today, the majority of our members opt for reimbursements via ACH.”

Once the transaction is initiated, policyholders receive a direct deposit in their bank account within one to two business days. Wagmo currently offers ACH transfers for wellness plans only, and has plans to extend the digital disbursement experience to Wagmo Insurance policyholders soon.
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