The following article is written in association with Applied Pay.
As independent agencies face increasing pressure to improve efficiency and accuracy in their financial operations, digital payment solutions have become a central focus. At Applied Net 2025, Chase Petrey (pictured), president of Applied Pay, discussed how the platform is addressing the complexities of insurance accounting, the rapid adoption of digital payments, and the future of AI-driven reconciliation.
Petrey explained that Applied Pay’s core responsibility is managing all money movement operations within the Applied ecosystem. “Anytime money moves within the ecosystem, that’s kind of the responsibility of Applied Pay. Whether that’s agency bill coming in or receiving commissions from carriers, any time money’s moved, whether that’s money in or out of the agency, all the processes around that is what Applied Pay’s responsibility is,” he said.
Launched in 2022, Applied Pay has quickly gained traction, particularly among larger agencies. “We started out really focused on bigger agencies. Now, of the top 40 brokers in the country, 26 or 28 are now adopting Applied Pay and another five are about to launch [with us]. That’s about 70% of the top 40 brokers,” Petrey said, adding that these brokers move as much money as around the next 2,000 combined. The platform has also seen strong adoption among smaller agencies through EZLynx, with thousands of agencies now using Applied Pay and billions of dollars in premiums processed annually.
Petrey attributed Applied Pay’s growth to product-market fit and the need for integrated, real-time accounting. “A payment is quite commoditized – a bank can move money. But the problem is it’s not integrated. You have your banking system and money’s moving over here, but you still have to account for it in your system of record. The administration of keeping these two systems mirroring each other is a huge burden,” he said. By integrating payments directly into the agency management system, Applied Pay keeps accounting up to date, reducing lag and manual reconciliation at month’s end.
As a result, Applied Pay is positioned as a key part of Applied’s broader financial management and “digital round trip” vision. Petrey explained, “Financial management is broader accounting – core accounting, ledgering, general ledger, subledgers, keeping a balance sheet up to date. But then you have all this transacting around it. We’ve been focused on automating agency bill, but there’s also direct bill, where the commission is remitted from the carrier to the agency.”
A recent milestone for Applied Pay was the launch of Applied Recon, an AI-powered reconciliation product that automates the complex process of matching carrier statements and commissions. “I don’t know if I’ve launched a product that has as much pent-up demand as Applied Recon. Agencies are just thrilled because it was perceived as an unsolvable problem – it just didn’t seem like something that could be solved, and so once AI entered the scene and started solving this, agencies are just thrilled because they just didn’t see it coming,” Petrey said.
Petrey broke down the reconciliation process into three automated stages: extraction, matching, and recording. “Let’s take a medium-sized agency. They’d be writing business with 20 to 30 carriers a month, each issuing statements in different formats. Someone has to take all these distinct formats and put it into a single spreadsheet that can then be line by line reconciled into accounting, and it is a huge investment for these agencies,” he said.
Applied Recon uses AI to extract data from statements, algorithmic matching to find the correct records in Epic, and then it records the revenue. “Algorithmic matching is important because the way data comes in from the carrier is often not how it was entered into Epic. A simple database match would not match ‘Petrey, Chase’ with ‘Chase Petrey,’ but an algorithmic match would. Because we have access to all of Epic’s data, we can recommend matches and assign matches based on the full context, which is a differentiator for us relative to third parties in the market,” Petrey said.
While Applied Pay’s integration with Epic and EZLynx offers a seamless experience for users of those systems, there are other digital payment and reconciliation solutions in the insurance market. Some competitors offer standalone payment gateways or third-party reconciliation tools, but these often require manual re-keying or lack the deep integration with agency management systems that Applied Pay provides. The ability to automate reconciliation within the system of record is a key differentiator for platforms that can offer it.
Petrey emphasized that while automation can handle much of the process, human oversight remains essential. “There’s only human intervention when there’s a probabilistic recommendation that we don’t feel like we can record without a human saying, ‘yes, I want to accept this match,’ because people’s income is tied to the result of this data.” He also noted the importance of compliance and data security, given the stakes involved in insurance accounting. “People’s paychecks are being paid,” he said. “I’m reporting financials to the SEC based on this data. The stakes are so high that data entry, although it had been automated in other departments long ago, has not been automated to that extent in accounting. But, because LLMs are so accurate now, that becomes a real opportunity for us.”
Petrey noted that customer feedback has played a significant role in shaping Applied Pay’s roadmap.
“The nice thing about Applied Pay is we get to operate like a startup within Applied. The nice thing that startups do is you live and die by your customers. You get one customer and then they influence your roadmap to a huge extent because you’re learning the problem with them. That’s very much the ethos within Applied Pay – acting like a startup, in particular with product development,” he said.
This approach has led to rapid iteration and a focus on solving real-world pain points. Petrey cited the high demand for Applied Recon as evidence that the company is addressing longstanding challenges for agencies.
As insurance agencies and brokerages continue to digitize their operations, the need for integrated, automated, and compliant payment and reconciliation solutions is becoming industry standard. The evolution of platforms like Applied Pay reflects a broader shift across insurance toward seamless, data-driven financial management – helping agencies reduce manual work, improve accuracy, and focus more on client service. As technology and regulatory expectations continue to advance, the ability to adapt and integrate new solutions will remain a key factor in agency competitiveness and operational resilience.
