In our economy, today, the methods of collecting money have since been classified as a competitive sport, in which many have earned their flying colors. All avenues and methods have been tried, tested and perfected, but what about refunding money to consumers? Be it a claim, a refund due to over deduction or payment of benefits.

The insurance industry is fundamentally set up to collect money. The refund of benefits owed to a client becomes a huge challenge and administration burden with added cost to the industry and consumer when the consumers do not update their contact information on a regular basis with the Insurer, which unfortunately is almost the rule. The challenge to contact a client to obtain the latest bank account detail becomes an even more challenging process when the monthly deduction of premiums is collected via payroll. Where the premium is collected via a bank channel, the bank account detail is known to the Insurer and refunds are a simple and effective process. In the case where the premium is however collected from payroll, the clients bank detail is not known to the Insurer and the information on record is almost always outdated. This is usually because there is little to no issues regarding payment and hence no need to contact the client.

Insurance companies spend huge amounts of money in efforts to obtain contact details of these clients to confirm their bank account detail, but the success rate is low. This naturally also has an impact on the refundable amount, as cost will be for the pocket of the client. If the client cannot be reached to refund the monies, the monies are allocated to a suspense account. These suspense amounts attract huge regulatory attention from the Financial Services Board, as Insurers are “incubating” money that does not belong to them. Regardless of huge efforts from Insurance companies to reduce their suspense accounts, very little success is achieved for the reasons mentioned above. Q LINK have designed a unique solution to solve this sticky matter where they are directly involved with payroll deductions.

The solution is not only extremely successful, it is secure, complies to PoPI and the bank detail of the employee is never made available to the Insurer due a unique arrangement between the employer, Q LINK and a bank. The bank account number is masked and the entire database that is created for this process, is deleted after each process. The solution is known as the Q LINK - “Money Out Solution”. Q LINK’s first attempt to illustrate the value of this process was when more than 300 million rand was paid to employees as a result of the demutualising process of a large Insurance company.

A second phase of refunds that largely emanates from over deductions and unclaimed benefits was successfully facilitated in which more than R109m was refunded to employees.

Q LINK values integrity and credibility to such a degree that we brought this solution to our clients and consumers to assist cash trapped consumers to receive monies owed to them.

For more information regarding this unique solution, please contact Q LINK on www.qlink.co.za