Union Planters Bank Gives Customers Options through Insurance Partnerships with Financial Keyosk

By Elizabeth Ann Peer

Doing business in the way the customer wants to interact with the company is the essence of good service. This is what Union Planters Bank (UPB, Memphis) had in mind when deciding to use Carpentersville, IL-based Financial Keyosk's technology to provide customers with the option of purchasing many types of insurance online or through an agent in a UPB branch.

John Dawson, CEO of Financial Keyosk, a Zurich North America company, recognized early on that the opportunity to sell insurance through banking portals was growing. "Banks want to start selling insurance. That became clear with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act," Dawson says. "Banks feel that they have a strong relationship with their customers, and with that strong relationship they are able to sell all kinds of products."

According to Joanne Collins, president of Union Planters Insurance Agency, "Our customers want to do business with us in many different ways and you have to be prepared to do that. So technology is a key because people want to do things early in the morning or late at night or from work, for example, so you can't always have real people there. We need to be prepared to do business as our customers want to do business."

Financial Keyosk was able to do just that, by providing the bank with a virtual agency platform called Virtual FX that allows customers to complete each step of the insurance process, along with the ability for licensed agents to perform insurance transactions on the platform. Financial Keyosk also has a customer care center staffed with licensed professionals who will provide information and assistance to service personnel and advisors at Union Planters' locations.

Financial Keyosk takes applications for insurance that are available from 20 carriers that provide insurance to both personal and small- to mid-size business customers in the P&C, benefits, health, 401(k) and banking products area. The offering "is designed to be a complete financial services one-stop shop," emphasizes Dawson.

As the relationship between the companies matures, there is more potential for other types of insurance to be sold, says Union Planters' Collins. "As we have started digging into some of our markets and our businesses, there are some niches where we're finding we need more of X," she says. "And we are starting to have that conversation with John Dawson and say that we think that there is a lot of opportunity here and we need you to go out and try to put more of those types of carriers on our platform."

Collins enforces the idea that there are many different types of customers, and with the help of partners such as Financial Keyosk, Union Planters Bank hopes to satisfy as many as possible. "There is no one answer, and we are very optimistic that we are getting closer and closer to meeting more customer needs," she says.