According to PYMNTS.com, the payments infrastructure for insurers is undergoing a major shift, moving from an aspirational goal to a contractual obligation for high availability and security. Elizabeth Hoemeke, CIO of payments platform One Inc, detailed how the company has implemented a major step-change in resilience by moving to a multi-region disaster recovery (DR) setup across all its products. Crucially, this isn’t just for compliance; the company now executes a full, real failover of both its products every single quarter. This rigorous practice surfaces edge cases and hardens systems against real-world crises. As One Inc scales to serve larger, tier-one insurance carriers, these infrastructure capabilities around uptime, security, and identity controls are becoming the decisive factor in winning business. The platform integrates with a wide array of payment providers, from Apple Pay and Zelle to traditional banks like JPMorgan Chase, aiming for breadth without introducing fragility.
The New Table Stakes
Here’s the thing: nobody gets excited about disaster recovery rehearsals. But Hoemeke’s point is that this is exactly where the battle is being won or lost now. High availability isn’t a nice-to-have feature you list on a sales sheet. It’s a line in the contract with massive financial penalties if you miss it. When she says they “execute a full failover every quarter,” that’s a staggering operational commitment. Most companies are lucky if they test their DR plan once a year in a controlled, tabletop exercise. Doing the real thing, on live(ish) systems, four times a year? That’s a completely different culture. It means your engineering and ops teams are constantly in a state of readiness, and your architecture has to be built to withstand that regular chaos. That’s what insurers are buying now: confidence. They’re not buying a payment button; they’re buying a guarantee that the money will always move, no matter what.
Boring Tech Is Strategic Tech
This whole conversation flips the script on how we view infrastructure. It’s not a cost center to be minimized. It’s the actual product differentiator. Hoemeke talks about her engineers wanting to “put hands on the keyboard” and do great work, and that’s enabled by a deliberate, focused tech strategy. One Inc consolidated on Microsoft Azure instead of chasing multi-cloud hype. Why? To reduce complexity and let their engineers build on a stable, well-understood platform. They’re using Kubernetes, APIs, and event-driven design to build composable services. This is all pretty standard, modern cloud-native stuff. But the key is they’re doing it so their team can focus on their own secret sauce—their IP—instead of constantly wrestling with foundational plumbing. It’s a classic focus play. And in a sector like insurance, where margins are tight and regulations are thick, that focus on operational excellence is the innovation.
The Ecosystem Tightrope
Now, building a rock-solid internal platform is only half the battle. The real trick is doing that while also being the most connected player in the room. One Inc has to seamlessly orchestrate transactions between an insurance carrier’s legacy system, a digital wallet like Venmo, a banking partner, and a fraud detection service—all in milliseconds, with perfect reliability. That’s a nightmare of integrations. Adding more partners increases “breadth” for clients but also introduces potential points of failure. So their entire architecture, from identity federation (so partners can log in securely) to deep monitoring and alerting, is about managing that complexity without becoming fragile. When you’re the hub in a giant, critical financial wheel, a tiny glitch at any spoke can blow up in your face. Their defense-in-depth strategy against things like BIN attacks isn’t just about security; it’s about maintaining integrity across this entire web of connections.
Data As The Quiet Weapon
Finally, there’s the data angle. All this robust infrastructure processing millions of transactions creates a valuable byproduct: data. Hoemeke mentions their data warehouses power client-facing insights. This is subtly huge. In the future, the winning platforms won’t just process a payment reliably. They’ll tell the insurance company, “Hey, 30% more of your customers in the Midwest are opting for installment plans this quarter, and here’s the demographic trend behind it.” That turns a utility into a strategic partner. It provides the visibility insurers need to compete on customer experience and optimize their own financials. So the infrastructure that holds everything together quietly also becomes the lens that reveals everything. It’s a powerful flywheel. Reliable systems attract more volume, which generates better data, which creates more value for clients, which locks in the business. It turns out the unsung heroes in infrastructure don’t just keep the lights on—they quietly build the moat.
