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Rhino - Pay Now
Company Overview
Rhino makes renting more affordable by offering a modern alternative to traditional security deposits. Instead of a large cash deposit upfront, Rhino provides renters with a low-cost insurance policy that covers the same liabilities as a security deposit.
As a product manager at Rhino, my responsibility was to increase our premium collection rate in order to improve our loss ratio — a key measure of profitability for insurance products.
Business Challenge
Insurance companies make money by collecting more in premiums than they pay out in claims. Unlike traditional insurance, Rhino does not cancel policies if the policyholder (renter) misses a monthly premium payment. While this approach ensured continuous coverage for their landlords, it posed a significant financial risk to the business due to a high volume of accounts receivable that owe Rhino money.
I worked closely with our Finance & Accounting teams to uncover the following business context:
- Burning millions $$$ — Despite generating $XX millions in net revenue, a whopping ~68% of this was being lost due to uncollected premiums, creating huge financial leakage.
- Double Whammy — Our commission structure allowed us to earn x% of each policy sold. However, if the premium was not collected, Rhino not only lost its commission, but also had to reimburse its reinsurance carriers that x%, further straining our cash reserves.
- Growing problem — The percentage of uncollected premium increased an alarming 270% from 2019 to 2022.
These problems created an existential risk to the business and addressing them became the highest priority for the business.
Problem Space
Quantitative Insights
I worked closely with our Analytics team to identify cohorts that exhibited this delinquency problem based on their payment frequency — upfront vs monthly payments.
Our analysis confirmed that the non-payment issue was confined to the monthly cohort, as upfront had a near-perfect premium collection rate of 99.7%. This helped us isolate the monthly cohorts as the target of our discovery efforts.
Qualitative Insights
After identifying the cohort for discovery, I worked with the Design lead to employ the following techniques to understand the issues faced by delinquent monthly customers:
- User Interviews — Conducted in-depth interviews to gather insights about their payment experiences and challenges.
- Surveys — Distributed surveys to get a quantitative read on the feedback gathered from user interviews.
Problem themes
- Poor Renter Education
- Many renters did not fully understand their financial obligations towards Rhino and the consequences of non-payment. Without this, we could not expect to successfully recover from them.
- Lack of Awareness
- Many renters were not aware they had missed payments, as only one email was sent at the time of the inital payment failure. In their Portal, the only indication of missed payments was a simple banner warning with a CTA to update their payment method.
- Members wanted to know how much they owed in detail. They lacked a way to see an itemized statement of their owed balance.
- Limited Payment Flexibility
- Our past research showed most Members only had a single card to their name and would often like to repay using their existing card on file, while we only offered the ability to update payment methods.
- Despite having intent to pay, many Members did not have the full amount to cover their debt. They wanted the option to make partial payments towards their balance.
- Our analytics revealed that a significant majority of Members accessed our site via iPhones and Android devices, indicating an opportunity to integrate with Digital Wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay to reduce payment friction.
Solution Space
Ideation
Using the Opportunity Solution Tree framework below, we mapped out the problem space to answer "which problems (red), if solved (green), could help improve our metric (blue)?"
Iterations
- v1 - Pay Now MVP
- Itemized Balance Breakdown - Renters need to clearly see their overdue balances, so they understand the amount owed and can take action.
- Dunning Campaign (email & SMS) - Ensure that renters are consistently reminded of their outstanding payments, leveraging marketing efforts to drive engagement and reduce missed payments. We also added better product education to the campaigns to ensure renters not only know about their missed payments but also understand how the product works and the consequences of not resolving their balances.
- Payment Method Retry / Update - Once aware of the debt, renters need an immediate and easy-to-use mechanism to retry failed payments or update their payment method. This ensures they can settle their balance quickly.
- v2 - Digital Wallets
- Apple / Google Pay - Our analytics revealed a significant majority of Members accessed our site via iPhones and Android devices, indicating an opportunity to implement streamlined payments via Apple and Google Pay.
- v3 - Payment Plans
- Payment Plan Optiosn - Introduced flexible payment options for renters who cannot pay the full balance upfront.
Impact: 8 months post-launch
Over the span of 8 months, we implemented these iterations and successfully recovered $2.5 million in uncollected premium. The combination of dunning campaigns, product education, and payment method improvements drove this recovery while reducing payment friction for our renters.
// WORK
ABHI
SINGH
