Every payment your client makes on an Occupational Accident Insurance placement carries a processing cost — roughly 3% on credit cards and ACH. Most agencies treat that as invisible overhead someone has to absorb. On our rails, fee pass-through flips it: the 3% is legally passed to the insured through ePayPolicy, built into checkout from the first payment. Fee pass-through is not a surcharge scheme bolted on after the fact. It is a native capability of the billing rail your agency gets the day your co-branded storefront goes live — and it is the quietest revenue line in commercial insurance right now.
What Fee Pass-Through Looks Like From the Agency Seat
Here is the entire workflow your office runs to operate fee pass-through: nothing. That is the design goal, and it is worth being precise about, because most producers hear “new revenue line” and brace for new work.
When your agency comes onto the platform, you get a co-branded storefront — your logo, your colors, your producer pre-filled on every form. A 1099 Protect enrollment page carrying your brand takes applications by phone, and when the account owner pays, the payment runs through ePayPolicy. The 3% processing fee is added at checkout and paid by the insured, exactly as the fee disclosure describes. Your CSRs never calculate it. Your bookkeeper never invoices it. There is no reconciliation spreadsheet, because the fee pass-through happens inside the payment itself.
Compare that to what most agencies do today: absorb card fees as a cost of doing business, or push clients to paper checks to avoid them. Both choices leak. Absorbing fees compounds across every payment on every placement, and check-chasing burns CSR hours that never show up on a P&L line but absolutely show up in your capacity.
The Billing Rail Underneath: Real-Time and Pay-As-You-Go
Fee pass-through works because the billing underneath it is built differently. This is not annual-premium billing with a payment portal stapled on. The WORK Program bills in real time, pay-as-you-go, against the account’s actual roster of 1099 participants.
Roster moves, billing follows
When an account owner adds a participant, billing picks them up. When a participant rolls off, billing drops them. There is no monthly premium reconciliation cycle, no year-end true-up surprise, and no awkward call where you explain to a client why their estimated exposure and their actual exposure diverged. The bill tracks the roster because the bill is generated from the roster.
Every payment is a clean event
Because billing runs continuously rather than annually, payments are smaller, more frequent, and individually simple. That is precisely the payment pattern where card and ACH rails outperform checks — and where fee pass-through quietly does its work on every single transaction. The insured gets a modern checkout. The agency gets a placement that never generates a billing service ticket.
New Revenue Line, Zero New Back Office
Run the math on a working commercial book. Take the accounts you already service that engage 1099 contractors — trucking fleets, last-mile delivery groups, staffing firms, IT consultancies. Each one that lands on the platform generates continuous pay-as-you-go payment flow, and every payment in that flow carries the 3% to the insured rather than to your loss column. Multiply that across a book and across a year, and fee pass-through stops looking like a checkout detail and starts looking like what it is: margin recovery at portfolio scale.
What your team never has to build
No merchant account application. No payment gateway integration. No PCI compliance project. No billing clerk. The rail exists, multiple agencies are already writing on it, and your agency plugs into it by getting appointed — not by building anything. If your agency has ever priced out what standing up compliant card processing with fee pass-through would cost internally, you already know why this is the fastest version of that decision you will ever make.
What it does for retention
Billing friction is a silent churn driver on commercial accounts. A placement that bills itself, syncs to the roster, and never sends your client a confusing invoice is a placement that renews. The revenue story gets attention, but the retention story is what compounds.
How Producers Use It in the Room
Fee pass-through is also a closing tool, and the producers who win with it use it early in the conversation rather than burying it in the fine print. When you are competing for a commercial account that runs 1099 contractors, most of what you and the incumbent quote will sound similar to the buyer. The billing experience will not. Walking an owner through a checkout that their contractors complete from a phone, a bill that tracks their actual roster week to week, and a fee structure that is disclosed cleanly at the point of payment is a demonstration, not a pitch — and demonstrations close.
It also reframes the agency’s own economics on the account. A placement where the agency absorbs processing costs quietly shrinks every year as payment volume grows. A placement with fee pass-through holds its shape. Producers do not need to say any of that to the client; they simply need to know that the account they are about to win will still look like a win on the agency’s books three renewals from now.
Questions Producers Ask About Fee Pass-Through
Is passing the fee to the insured actually allowed?
Yes. The pass-through is executed through ePayPolicy, which is built for exactly this: compliant, disclosed processing-fee handling on insurance payments. The insured sees the fee at checkout before paying, the disclosure is part of the payment flow, and nothing about it lives in a side agreement or a manual workaround. Your agency does not administer the compliance piece any more than it administers the card network — the rail carries it.
Does it add friction for the account owner?
In practice, the opposite. Account owners are already paying processing fees on most of what their business buys online; what they have not had is insurance billing that behaves like modern software. A transparent 3% at checkout on a bill that matches their actual roster reads as fair. An opaque annual invoice that requires a reconciliation call reads as friction. The accounts on the platform vote with their renewals.
What does the agency have to maintain?
Nothing beyond what you already do: own the relationship. The storefront, the applications, the billing, and the fee pass-through run on our infrastructure. Your team’s role is the one it is best at — bringing the accounts and keeping the relationships — while the machine handles everything between application and payment.
What Going Live Actually Looks Like
An agency sent us a logo on a Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon, their branded enrollment page was taking applications. That is the standard, not the highlight reel: same-day storefront, 24 pieces of print-ready agency-branded collateral delivered on day one, phone-first applications your clients’ contractors complete in minutes, and quote-to-bind measured in hours.
Coverage is available in all states from a single appointment — no state-by-state endorsement chase — so a national fleet or a multi-state staffing account onboards exactly like a local one. The billing rail, the fee pass-through, the storefront, and the collateral all arrive together, because they are one machine, not four projects.
If you want to see how the whole platform sits behind your brand, the agency solutions overview walks through the distribution model, and the custom sales sheet generator shows how fast co-branded collateral comes together.
The Move
Fee pass-through is the rare growth lever that requires no new headcount, no new software, and no new workflow — only a decision. Your book already makes the payments. The only question is which side of the 3% your agency sits on.
Getting appointed takes days, not quarters. Start here: become an agent, send us a logo, and watch the machine stand itself up.