Imburse

Imburse, now operating as Duck Creek Payments, was founded in 2017 in Zurich, Switzerland, by Oliver Werneyer, Carl Strempel, David Scott Turner, and Mark Jerome. The founding concept emerged from a previous venture by Werneyer and Strempel, a flight-tracking and delay insurance app called Flynrate. They identified a significant bottleneck when their insurance partner could not support the real-time payouts customers expected, quoting a lengthy and expensive IT project to implement the capability. This challenge sparked the creation of Imburse, a platform designed to solve the complex, costly, and time-consuming problem of integrating corporate IT systems with the global payments ecosystem.

Acquired by Duck Creek Technologies in January 2023, the company functions as a payments-as-a-service provider specifically for the insurance industry. It targets property and casualty (P&C) and general insurers, enabling them to connect to a wide array of payment providers and technologies through a single integration. The business model is centered on a cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that simplifies both premium collections and claims disbursements. This approach allows insurance carriers to bypass heavy IT development costs and future-proof their systems against the constantly changing payments landscape.

The core offering, now part of the Duck Creek suite, includes the Duck Creek Payments Orchestrator. This platform acts as a universal connector or middleware, giving insurers the flexibility to add or switch between different payment methods—such as credit cards, real-time payments, and cross-border transactions—in any market without new integration projects. By handling the technical complexities, the service accelerates speed-to-market for new payment options from months to a matter of minutes or weeks. The platform will continue to be offered on a standalone basis while also being integrated into Duck Creek's broader set of insurance software solutions, extending its reach across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Keywords: payments orchestration, insurance payments, InsurTech, payment gateway, P&C insurance, SaaS, premium collections, claims disbursement, payment integration, cross-border payments, FinTech, payments-as-a-service, middleware, digital payments, Duck Creek Technologies, real-time payments, payment processing, policyholder payments, insurance technology, global payments ecosystem