Every credit card payment that moves through a commercial book carries a processing cost of roughly 3%, and on most books somebody quietly absorbs it. Insurance fee pass-through flips that line item. On the 1099 Protect platform, the 3% credit card and ACH processing fee is legally passed to the insured through ePayPolicy — automatically, on every payment, on every account. No invoicing project, no collections follow-up, no new back office headcount. The rails collect it while your producers sell. It is the fastest revenue line we stand up for a new agency partner, and it is live the same day the rest of the platform is.
Most agencies have never seen this working because their current placements were never built for it. Here is what the capability looks like from the agency’s seat, and what it adds up to across a working book.
What Insurance Fee Pass-Through Actually Means
When an insured pays by card or ACH, a payment processor takes its cut. In a traditional setup, that cost lands in one of two places: the agency eats it as a cost of doing business, or it gets vaguely baked into pricing where nobody can see it and nobody can defend it. Either way, the money is gone and no one made a decision about it.
Fee pass-through moves that cost to the point of payment, disclosed and itemized, paid by the party actually choosing the payment method. The insured sees the fee line at checkout, the processor is paid, and the premium arrives whole. ePayPolicy structures the pass-through to comply with the applicable payment rules, which is exactly the kind of detail an agency should never have to manage by hand — and on our platform, you don’t. It is switched on as part of standard onboarding, not offered as an upsell or a configuration project.
The result is a recovered margin that behaves like a new revenue line: it appears on every single payment, it scales with volume, and it requires zero incremental labor after day one.
Why Agencies Leave This Money on the Table
Not because they don’t want it. Because the plumbing under most placements makes it impractical. If your billing runs on paper invoices, monthly statements, and a premium audit at year end, inserting a compliant, itemized processing fee into every transaction is a genuine project — payment portal changes, disclosure language, reconciliation workflows. Faced with that, most shops shrug and keep absorbing the cost.
That is the difference between a feature and a platform. Fee pass-through only becomes effortless when the entire payment path is digital end to end: application in, coverage bound, payment collected, fee itemized, ledger updated — one continuous flow. Bolting it onto legacy billing is hard. Building on rails that already do it is a checkbox.
There is also a simple visibility problem. A cost that never appears as its own line on a report never gets managed. Processing fees hide inside merchant statements and net deposits, so even sharp agency principals rarely know the annual number. The first time most partners see it calculated, the reaction is the same: that was real money, every year, and nobody signed off on losing it.
How the Rails Collect It for You
Real-time, pay-as-you-go billing
Our Occupational Accident Insurance programs bill in real time, pay-as-you-go, matched to the account’s active roster. There is no monthly premium audit, no true-up surprise, no reconciliation spreadsheet. Because billing runs continuously, the fee pass-through runs continuously with it — every payment event carries its own itemized processing line, collected at the moment the payment happens.
The fee line rides on every payment
ePayPolicy sits inside the payment flow itself. The insured picks card or ACH, the 3% processing fee is displayed and collected in the same transaction, and settlement happens without anyone at your agency touching it. There is nothing to invoice, nothing to chase, and nothing to reconcile at month end. Your team’s involvement in the entire fee lifecycle is zero. That is what we mean when we say the machine collects it while you sell.
The Math on a Working Book
Run the arithmetic on one account. A staffing client paying $5,000 a month in pay-as-you-go premium by card generates roughly $150 a month in processing costs — $1,800 a year that, on legacy rails, someone was silently absorbing. Now multiply across ten accounts, or forty. On a book with meaningful card volume, insurance fee pass-through quietly recovers five figures a year without a single additional sale, hire, or workflow.
And because the fee is disclosed and paid by the party selecting the payment method, the recovered margin doesn’t come out of your relationship with the client. ACH remains available for insureds who prefer it. Nobody is cornered; the cost simply lands where the payment choice is made instead of disappearing into your margin.
For producers, there is a second-order effect worth noticing: an agency that isn’t bleeding processing costs has more room to compete on service. The recovered line funds the things that win renewals.
It also compounds with growth. Every new account placed on the platform arrives with the fee line already running, so the recovered margin scales at exactly the pace your book does — no renegotiation, no per-account setup, no ceiling.
One Line of a Larger Machine
Fee pass-through is a single gear in the distribution machine we stand up for every agency partner. The same rails give you a co-branded storefront — your logo, your colors, your producer pre-filled on every form — live in a day. An agency sent us a logo on a Tuesday morning; that Tuesday afternoon their branded enrollment page was taking applications. Onboarding also includes 24 pieces of print-ready, agency-branded collateral delivered day one, generated through the same system behind our custom sales sheet generator.
Applications are phone-first, built for a 1099 workforce that lives on mobile. Quotes and binds happen in hours, not days. Coverage is available in all states without state-by-state endorsements, so a client with drivers or contractors scattered across the map is one program, not a patchwork. If you want the full picture of what the platform hands an agency on day one, the agency solutions overview lays it out end to end.
Multiple agencies are live and writing on the platform today, and same-day onboarding is the standard, not the exception. The fee pass-through line starts producing on the first payment their first account makes.
What Going Live Looks Like
Getting appointed is not a systems project on your side. You bring your brand and your book knowledge; we stand up the storefront, the collateral, the billing rails, and the fee pass-through configuration. There is no software to install, no portal to build, and no billing migration — accounts you place on the platform are born on the new rails.
From the day you’re live, every card and ACH payment on your placed accounts carries its own itemized processing line, collected automatically. You will never send an invoice for it, and you will never think about it again — which is precisely the point. The best revenue lines are the ones that run without you.
If you write commercial accounts that use 1099 contractors — trucking, last-mile, staffing, healthcare, IT — this is sitting on your book right now. Get appointed and we will stand the machine up around your brand, fee pass-through included, and let the rails do the collecting.