The 6 Questions Every Tech Platform Should Ask an ICHRA Payment Partner
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For tech platforms and administrators building ICHRA programs, enrollment UX and eligibility engines get most of the attention in a platform buying decision. The payment infrastructure underneath gets the least; however, it’s the layer that’s first to break under volume and the hardest one to replace.
ICHRA adoption keeps increasing. The HRA Council’s 2026 Growth Trends for ICHRA & QSEHRA report found more than 20,000 U.S. businesses now offer ICHRA or QSEHRA to at least 500,000 employees, with 34% growth year over year even among the report’s most conservative measure. The employers evaluating a platform today are bigger than the early adopters from 2023 and 2024. Next year’s payment volume on any given platform is unlikely to resemble this year’s.
At 40 employers, a miscalculated premium is a one-off. At 400, the same error can run for months before anyone catches the pattern and result in double charges when an employee switches plans without canceling prior coverage, payment errors during a vendor transition, or coverage lapses from a missed payment. When a premium arrives late or goes to the wrong carrier, the employer holds the platform responsible, regardless of which vendor’s infrastructure caused it.
A platform that hasn’t pressure-tested its payment infrastructure against this curve will find out where it breaks in production, in front of employers and employees, instead of in a vendor evaluation.
Here are six questions worth asking before you evaluate and sign a payment partner:
1. How much can this partner handle scaling?
Ask how many employers, employees, and transactions they’ve handled, and what their client retention rate looks like. A strong signal is payment volume that’s grown alongside ICHRA adoption itself, sustained across multiple years rather than a single early pilot. Signing a multi-year contract bets your platform’s growth on this partner’s infrastructure. Retention is the evidence that existing clients made the same bet and stayed.
2. Is the API live for the full ICHRA lifecycle, or just enrollment?
Enrollment gets built first because it’s the visible piece. Ask which endpoints are live in production today versus still on a roadmap and whether the API covers mid-year carrier or plan changes, termination with structured reason codes, transaction history, balance lookups, and payment retrieval. Whatever’s missing from that list turns into a manual ticket the moment a real employer hits it, and at scale, that ticket becomes someone’s full-time job.
3. How deep are the banking relationships?
Payment infrastructure is only as good as the banks behind it. Ask whether the partner has integrated banking relationships built over multiple implementations, or basic electronic connectivity that hasn’t been tested against anything unusual. Ask how diverse their network is across national and regional banks. Regional banks often add flexibility for sub-account structures. The first funding reversal or mid-year sub-account restructuring is what shows whether the depth is real.
4. Was this built for ICHRA premium payments, or added to an existing payment solution?
Carrier routing, mid-cycle plan changes, termination logic, and premium reconciliation take years to build well. Ask directly whether the solution was purpose-built for ICHRA premium payments or is a feature added to a general payments platform, and ask how carrier changes, reconciliation, and corrections get handled today.
5. Can this partner get you live before your next open enrollment?
For platforms with calendar-year employer groups, January 1 is a hard deadline with no makeup window. Ask how quickly your engineering team gets sandbox access after signing an NDA, and ask them directly whether your January 1 target is realistic from where you stand today. A partner worth the switch typically opens sandbox access within a week of the NDA. From there, the pace depends on your team’s own engineering capacity to build against a working API.
6. Will they prove it before asking you to sign?
Payment infrastructure can’t be fairly evaluated from a slide deck. Ask whether your engineering team can test the API under NDA before any commitment, working against real test data covering funded and unfunded employer scenarios and multiple enrollment states. Ask whether the partner will run a no-cost savings analysis against your existing payment data, modeling paper check elimination, digital conversion, and revenue-sharing potential. A partner willing to prove it works before asking for a signature is confident enough to be held to that same standard after go-live.
What infrastructure looks like versus a feature
Premium Payment Manager™ was built specifically for ICHRA premium payments, with a production API covering the full lifecycle, including the employer-side operations that don’t always show up in a competitor’s pitch deck: banking setup, funding configuration, and real-time balance visibility. It runs on ECHO®’s payment infrastructure, with sandbox access available under NDA before you commit to anything.
If you’re evaluating payment partners against a 2027 open enrollment deadline, Premium Payment Manager is worth putting through these six questions directly.