Innovest’s cutting edge, comprehensive solution - InnoPay
Since the Baby Boomer generation began to retire in 2011, benefit payments have become an increasingly demanding task for trust companies.
The volume of payments has increased dramatically as the market absorbs roughly 10,000 new retirees a day.
Meanwhile, as more states and local taxing authorities begin to seek withholding and remittances from retirement benefit payments, it has become increasingly difficult and complex to ensure accurate and timely payments.
And finally, since many platforms are antiquated, seldom updated and require extensive manual data keying, the process of making benefit payments puts a burden on trust company staff and resources.
Innovest Systems offers InnoPay, the benefit payments system and surrounding services which streamline the process of benefit payments, providing an automated system with capabilities for calculating payments, determining and making appropriate tax remittances, printing checks, tax forms, confirmations and other documents and provides services to payees through a state-of-the-art call center.
Innovest’s payment solution has been in the benefit payment business for more than 40 years and today provides integrated services to leading regional and national banks.
The platform currently handles some six million payments per year and generates more than 10 million documents annually. Benefit payment applications are often the neglected stepchild of trust company software, with few resources devoted to updating and improving capabilities.
Innovest, by contrast, has made a significant financial commitment to its benefit payment capabilities over the last several years, continually upgrading capabilities to serve customers better.
For instance, over the last three years, InnoPay has integrated two older mainframe programs for processing lump sum and recurring payments into a modern multi-tier application – all without ever interrupting service to customers.
The new system is easier to maintain and update, meaning that customers get problems fixed and new functionality added more quickly. InnoPay releases product updates on a quarterly basis with one additional release at year-end when new tax information becomes available.
This ensures that payment and remittance software is always up to date, withholding the right amounts from benefit payments, even as tax rates change. The solution also ensures withholding payments are remitted in a timely fashion as required by the taxing authority, whether on a weekly, monthly or quarterly schedule.
That schedule can change as the amount of withholding changes, so the solution system automatically figures out how much and how often to remit.
Innovest has partnered with FPS Trust, which has the capabilities to actually make these payments – so the Innovest solution doesn’t just calculate the right amount but actually takes care of remitting taxes and withholdings to the appropriate federal, state and local taxing authorities.
Servicing customers with questions about their benefit payments can take a lot of manpower and resources, so Innovest offers customers access to a newly created white label call center. Payees can call to find out the status of payments or to make changes in personal data like names and addresses.
Very few benefit payments providers offer this service to their trust company clients. And finally, Innovest maintains its own print facility to create the millions of documents required to support benefit payments – including checks, tax reporting, and account statements.
Over the past four years, this facility has been significantly upgraded with new equipment and updated software.
Processing benefit payments has increasingly become an area of risk for many companies as payment processing has become more time-consuming and difficult as the volume of payments grows due to an aging workforce and the complexity of tax withholding increases as states and localities tax these benefits.
Many trust company platforms provide only the most rudimentary benefit payment capabilities to their clients — and do not invest as much as they should in these products to keep them accurate and functional for customers.
Innovest Systems sees the InnoPay platform as an opportunity to increase operational efficiencies while at the same time mitigate risk which is why Innovest Systems has put significant resources into InnoPay by building and enhancing its benefit payments platform, updating its software four times a year and adding ancillary services like paying agent services, payee call center support and outsourced printing to provide an end-to-end benefit payment solution for its clients.
For more information on InnoPay and how it can meet your company’s benefit payment needs, contact Maryanne Campbell by email at mcampbell@innovestsystems.com or by phone at (212) 266-6618.
