Insurance License Compliance: Managing More than Renewals

Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Insurance Compliance: Managing More Than Just License Renewals." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

So joining us for our webinar today are Calla Heathman and Brian Bartnicki. These two are some of our expert business license sales engineers here at CSC. So with that, I would like to welcome in Calla and Brian.

Calla: Great. Thanks, Annie. So to kind of kick us off today, we're starting with a little bit about CSC. As you may have noted on the title of this, "Managing More Than Just License Renewals," and that's really what CSC is here for and kind of what we stand for. We are the world's leading provider of business administration and compliance solutions, which really just in short means that we can help with a lot of things that you might be experiencing in the compliance space. We have a lot of trusted partners across different groups of companies, and we truly are the business behind business. And that's what we'll focus a lot on today, just how the idea of compliance being in the insurance industry can compound to just more than specifically a license renewal.

So diving into this, what we're going to be focusing on is just what the compliance landscape looks like. When we talk about what insurance compliance is, what do we really mean at CSC? What are the things that come up in the idea of having this compliance landscape in your industry? Secondly, this idea of a compliance continuum, how that evolves or changes or flows. It really is a continuous type of process with all the things that you have to be mindful of throughout that compliance continuum, if you will.

Thirdly, we'll look at some challenges. So Brian and I meet with clients or prospects every day, and throughout those processes, we learn a lot about the things that you might be experiencing today or that people face by way of managing all of this information. So we'll dive into some of that. We'll also look at how CSC can help you through those processes or challenges and become a partner for you, maybe be a little bit more strategic in your approach to how you manage compliance or use partnerships to manage compliance. So let's go ahead and dive in here.

The insurance compliance landscape, again, this is really defining how, here at CSC, we're thinking about all the items that you have to deal with on a daily basis when it comes to compliance. That certainly include renewals, but maybe are not limited to that.

So to kick us off, the biggest thing in the compliance space and maybe what you focus on within your roles is this idea of managing the producers and the agency licensing and the ability to be able to sell policy and operate in these different states. So that's really focusing on any new expansion, new applications, whether it just be for entities or also adding in those individuals to the mix. Certainly the renewal processing and trying to understand when all those things are coming due, what states you're operating in, how often they renew or don't renew, and managing the potential of updates and changes to those licenses. Did someone get married? Do they have a name change? Is there an address change, a residency? All of those other things that play a role in the licensing landscape, if you will.

Brian, what about the next phase of this for us?

Brian: Yeah. So regulatory alerts and monitoring, that's going to be items outside of the renewal process. There might be things that affect the status of your license, whether, for example, it's individuals failing to complete continuing education. As a designated responsible producer, that can actually affect the agency license itself. There are regulatory matters that need to be attested to throughout the year or when you go to file, such as felonies, misdemeanors, disclosures on certain matters that need to be just honestly answered.

And then beyond that, you have the appointment landscape. For those of you who have quite a large network of individuals selling policy for multiple carriers, sometimes you really want to have an understanding of who those carriers are, what lines they're selling, and just the status of those appointments.

Calla: Yeah, absolutely. All going hand in hand with certainly licensure for sure. The next piece of this is just the idea that there could be evolving requirements throughout the way and how you're navigating maybe understanding those or being sure that that's what's required. So what we've seen recently would be maybe states that didn't require fingerprints before, but now do and how you kind of address those situations. Or the supporting documentation, which, Brian, you'll talk about in this next bucket. But have you been in business for a really long time, and some things have changed with how departments speak to each other, which trigger other things that need to be done prior to being able to renew or obtain a license and how that gets managed, again, through this kind of next bucket here, Brian.

Brian: And as Calla alluded to, when we talk to clients kind of in the insurance industry, some of them really don't have insight, or the secretary of state universe really isn't part of their responsibility. Sometimes that's managed by legal. The decision kind of always comes into play. Where do we need to register with the secretary of state? Is the state requiring us to do that? Sometimes you go to apply for licenses and the states are forcing you to register prior. But the decision is always there. Where do we really need this? As an internal organization, you'd have to make that decision. But when you do that, understand you're going to need an agent for service of process matters. And beyond that, too, you're going to also have that additional compliance step to report your officers and directors, make sure everything is up to date, again, in that secretary of state level.

So it's all related in some capacity. So some of you may be involved in all these functions. Or others, it might be something that, again, is parsed out based on kind of your responsibilities.

Calla: Moving into just our next idea is really that compliance continuum and understanding that compliance doesn't really ever end. It's always continuous. Once you finish one thing, there's maybe always something else to worry about or updates and things that need to happen. So when you're working through your compliance process, we think about this in a little bit of four different buckets, if you will.

So the top left on the screen here, you'll see establishing these licenses. That's really what you're doing from the start. How do you start the process? And that could be whether you're starting a new endeavor, maybe you have a new agency that you're heading up, or you're just expanding what your current footprint looks like. So we're thinking about all of those items and establishing where you're licensed by way of an agency with any of those corresponding individuals or producers that also need to have those licenses for your organization. And then that idea of do you have to register with the secretary of state and how you get those registrations to just establish being able to do business within those states.

On top of that, you would move over to the right here, where you're maintaining. And this is really when we're thinking about maintaining all of those things that have expiration dates. In this limited viewpoint, it's probably just your license renewals, annual reports, things to just keep that maintenance up to date or the compliance up to date. And again, establishing and maintaining can be happening all at the same time. So it is that continuous here.

Brian had mentioned this from a monitoring standpoint or those regulatory alerts and how you monitor items in between these periods, because license updates or the RIRS alerts that you might be familiar with receiving when things are potentially not as expected for those items coming through, like background checks and all of that. And then the appointment tracking, how are we consistently monitoring those items to ensure that the maintenance can be done effectively, and even how you can establish those licenses if some of those items have come up as red flags during that monitoring phase.

And then lastly, we're looking at optimization. We understand that this is a continuous process. You're always going to be experiencing each one of these or maybe one more so than others. But the idea behind optimization is: How do you take a step back and look at what are you doing? Does it work for you? Do you have centralized oversight? Maybe in your position you're managing a group of producers or a group of companies, and you need to understand what's happening through all of those. Do you have that reporting and visibility structure that's working for you and able to meet maybe what management looks for? And how are you mitigating your risk?

And this is something that will also be continuous. If you couldn't tell by the structure of this, we always have to understand that we're optimizing our processes to ensure the establishing, the maintaining, and the monitoring of all of these compliance metrics is working for us and how does that get done. And I alluded to this earlier, but this is really when we work with folks that experience maybe challenges throughout these things, and that's when a lot of this comes up. So, Brian, would you walk us through some of the things that we typically hear or see?

Brian: Yeah. When Calla and I talk to a lot of clients, kind of the big five that I'll call, with RIRS challenges, are the following. So the first one that's going to come up on the screen, on the next slide, is going to be that of volume. So once that kind of comes up, we can talk through it.

The volume, some of you might have 1 entity in 10 states, 50 states. You might have one producer. You might have 100 producers, 400 producers, 1,000. The volume kind of what you are dealing with here is sometimes very difficult to manage. Most of you might have different responsibilities within the organization. Finding the time to manage items, as you scale, like in the insurance world, you might be acquiring different books of business ,which could easily accelerate the volume which you're now responsible for. And just really making sure handling that scalability, even if it's going down, terminating people, getting rid of licenses, getting rid of lines of authority, just kind of the day-to-day management of volume is quite difficult.

And then data, a lot of you on the webinar today talked about you're tracking everything through Excel. Obviously, that goes to the fact that you're manually doing that work. You're constantly evolving it. The challenges that people run into, there's no centralized place for them to view that information. And one of the other things I do want to bring up is really sort of dealing with insurance licenses. There's a lot of sensitive information, personal identifying information, when we're talking about the insurance industry, whether those are birthdates of individuals, Social Security numbers, background information, employment history. The challenge that a lot of companies run into, when we talk to them, is a lot of that data is just being sent simply over email exchange, and that's not a good way to do it. So trying to figure out how to get that data secure because we just can't have that just all over the place.

And the sheer complexity, understanding when these licenses are coming due. Some of you may know, for people that are managing these licenses, they could be due on anniversary months. They're going to be maybe biannual in nature. So you might not be always aware of it. It might come out of the blue, just because you haven't thought about it in some time. It might be due based on someone's birthday. It could be based on multiple factors. So trying to figure out the complexity of when it's coming due.

Again, juggling these other responsibilities is difficult, and that really goes to the expertise, right? It's not your first job. It's not something that anyone is maybe full-time. You might have some people that are full-time in it. But there are just so many levels of insurance. And not only insurance, but we talked about the other avenues of compliance, the secretary of state side, the annual report side. Trying to deal with that expertise, especially if you have staff changes, people switch roles, they evolve, trying to keep that in a consistent place is difficult.

And ultimately, non-compliance. When things do occur, and they are going to occur, how are you physically handling it when people have issues and you're unable to sell a policy? Generally, there's a reactive approach, and we'll talk about that later on. But really you can't have non-compliance be an issue, but it always is. There's a lot of scrambling. You could have court cases, things that come up as a result of this.

So these are really the big five that I would say, when we talk to clients, that come into play.

Calla: Good. So really optimizing your process. How can we help you do that? What do we have available that can fit into that continuum of items that come up on your day-to-day activities?

So really to start here, the biggest piece of how CSC supports the insurance space today is through our outsourcing model, and our service is designed to become an extension of your team internally. So we're thinking about the producers, the agencies, and any of those licenses. We're not just limiting to certain lines of authority. There are all major lines included in this. And then, there's also support for specialty licenses. If you are an agency or a company that maybe also has other things, like adjuster licenses or TPA licenses, those are really considered as part of our insurance model here.

And really what this outsourcing solution does is it allows for CSC to provide you with a dedicated support individual, someone, who's an insurance license specialist on our side, that would assist in proactively managing the overall license portfolio. And that just means we track the expiration dates. We understand the rules, when we should be filing, how often those things are coming due. And then we take the appropriate steps, on your behalf, to meet those requirements prior to deadlines. And that's really imperative. Like Brian was mentioning, it kind of takes that complexity out of things. And it gives you a space to see transparently what licenses you have and then actively what's happening.

So the way we do that is by centralizing all of your data, and we provide our secure, web-based platform that is going to be available for you to log in any time that you need to. And it's just going to take the critical pieces of data related to your licenses and create them in a really easy way to see what's happening. So you see all of the licenses, their states, who they're assigned to, any lines of authority, all of those key metrics, and kind of most importantly, what's happening with them, what are the statuses, are they currently in process, are they submitted, is there something that we need. And this is all really just centralized into one technology. So that way you don't have to keep those spreadsheets or figure out where this data comes from or consistently log in to Sircon or an IPR. These are things that you can just log in to CSC for and see and understand that the work is being done.

Secondly, with this platform, we provide that that added level of security that Brian was mentioning a lot of our clients struggle with. How is data shared? How do you access it? Basically, through our portals, we are giving you a place to not only see your information securely, but share that data that we need to file licenses in a very secure way. I mean everything that you're sending through is encrypted in transit and at rest, and you're not leveraging emails or other things to provide that sensitive data. Everything is flowing through that secure portal.

One of the other things that our service really does for our clients is make sure that you have the fees paid upfront. And then that way, when we're thinking about becoming your partner, you don't have to worry about what's going to be due. We start the work well in advance, and we process the payments for you direct to the jurisdictions so you don't have to worry about any of that. When we send you the invoices after the work is done, all of those jurisdiction fees are pass-through costs. There's no markup or anything on them. We would have just made it easier for you to understand that these licenses were submitted and submitted on time.

And then the final piece of this is all of those other items that are related to license renewals but maybe could sometimes be forgotten. So we have our PDB alert module that allows for a lot of those regulatory alerts, the license alerts, anything coming by way of appointments or background information, things like that directly into the CSC platform. So that allows you to receive those same-day alerts when there are changes occurring that you need to be able to respond to or we need to be able to respond to as your partner to ensure that the licenses are staying compliant and there isn't that gray area or really waiting. So all of that is compiled into one single sign-on platform for you, and then you have that dedicated support that's going to facilitate the license renewal process to make your life easier and not have to worry so much about all of those challenges that that Brian mentioned earlier in the slides above.

So moving into the way that this kind of partnership works is it's pretty simple to set up, and that's why we like to highlight that. Step one for us is that we would gather the license data. So a lot of the times there's this question of: "Well, how do we get this to you? We have a spreadsheet. Do you need that?" The reality is we need your NIPR numbers, and then what we're able to do is just download the license data, the critical pieces that are required for renewal from NIPR and be able to build all of that license information directly into your CSC platform. So it's kind of minimal work for you. Really no heavy lifting on sharing that data. Certainly share your spreadsheet, but it's not required.

Additionally, we would then start to collect that information that's required for filing. If we're a partner of yours today, we might have some of it. Other things, like the individual information, again, we'll send you those links through the secure portal so you can share that data with us and be able to use that for the filing. So there's limited interaction for standard details that we would always have on file.

Once we're able to submit licenses, what we're going to do is kind of take that approval and the submission and make sure that those are included in your portfolio. So when you're in here, you can see copies of and evidence of your filings within the platform. And then that way you don't have to track that down. You don't have to go through emails. You don't have to go to the state sites or anything else. Everything within your CSC platform is going to be visible for you. and you don't really need to go anywhere else.

Lastly, we send that consolidated invoice. We typically subscribe our insurance clients to a monthly schedule. So the invoices that are coming through could really be that you could get a lot of in invoices depending on when your renewal frequencies are. So we limit that to once a month. And again, each one of those licenses is itemized so you can very clearly see what we filed, what the fee was for CSC, and then also what those payments were.

And then, again, that last step is when you are in the service, we'd be proactively managing those changes that are coming through the PDB and making sure that you have the appropriate alerts set up for any updates or things that may affect your licenses and trigger us to work together to make sure that they're solved.

So that's really how the process works. And I think the biggest piece of this is really we know that renewals are very important and keeping compliance up to date with those are very important, but that last step is also pretty critical. So, Brian, I think maybe I'll pass it to you to kind of walk us through the why behind that.

Brian: Yeah. So kind of over the last couple years, we were talking to our clients and really the thing that we heard from almost all of them was the need that they wanted to find out about items that affected their licenses beyond what CSC was managing. So PDB alerts stand for producer database alerts. They are things that CSC is able to receive through NIPR, the National Insurance Producer Registry once they hear directly from the Department of Insurance. Think of it as, to use the corny phrase, it's insurance for insurance.

So we're able to physically proactively alert you. So there might be delinquencies that come into play. I used the earlier example maybe somebody failed to complete CE, or their license was terminated because they failed to physically maybe make a disclosure particularly, or maybe they got terminated with an administrative action because they didn't report that they had a DUI, or they never disclosed that they had a child support obligation. Those are just a couple examples. Maybe you were delinquent because you never reported within 30 days that you moved or you changed your name through marriage, something to that effect. So the key here is that whenever these items occur and appointments are another one. If you're terminated because you're not selling enough policy potentially, for those of you that, again, manage a large network and you want to know if someone can't sell a carrier's policy, you want to be notified immediately. Or if someone is added to sell a policy for a carrier, you want to be aware of that.

All of these transactions, any of these kind of ad hoc things, which may occur as a surprise, CSC is physically able to immediately upon NIPR finding about that notify you through our secure channels of that data. So to talk a little bit further about that, the next slide is going to just summarize these things.

I mentioned kind of the phrase "insurance for insurance." Instead of you finding out and being reactive, once that alert comes into play, you can immediately take action to prevent situations where people are selling policy not being licensed, which can, again, create sometimes very large fines for that matter.

The other value is the physical data. We're talking about sensitive information potentially about individuals, the agency, anything in the insurance world. This is all taking place in our technology, in CSC's SOC 2 compliant universe. Anyone who has access to your site can view that data in your account.

And ultimately, again, to kind of reinforce this, it gives you the ability to take action immediately, reducing the risk overall. And it gives you kind of an assurance of good standing beyond the technology itself. Anyone can physically pull that data. You can extract it from the technology, and it gives you a visual to provide if anyone, we talked about auditing here, maybe people want a report to see all the people you have selling or where the agency is licensed in the East Coast. You want to pull all Mid-Atlantic states, or you want to just view different pieces of data. It gives you the ability to have that data at your fingertips. And again, the PDB alerts are really kind of just a wonderful way of keeping you apprised of everything outside of the license itself.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pass it back to Calla to talk about some additional compliance solutions.

Calla: Yeah, great. Thanks, Brian. I think that overview on the PDB alerts is really insightful. The one thing I'll note, it wouldn't be a live webinar if there weren't some potential tech issues here. So I'm not sure if it was appearing this way for anyone else, but on my screen that slide looked a little bit funny. I think it was just the way it translated. So I will make sure that any of the items in the widget are up to date. So if you do choose to download anything, you have all of the letters. Again, it may just have been me that was seeing that, but if you did, our apologies. You never know what you're going to get.

So yeah, like Brian had mentioned, these additional compliance solutions. Again, some of you may partner with us for these items today. But it is really part of the license or the insurance compliance continuum. How do all of these things fit in together? In your industry, certainly licensure is always maybe the number one factor, ensuring that you're up to date on all your licenses so you don't have interruptions in your ability to sell policy. But there are these other items that come into play, which we've touched base on a little bit.

So a lot of you may be running into potentially registering more with secretary of state offices, and that triggers some of these other requirements, like needing to list an agent for service or process or the idea of a registered agent. It's really simply just to receive service of process on your behalf and make sure that you can securely receive that and have a platform also to be able to understand where you're registered and how you're receiving that information and acknowledging it.

In addition to that, when you register with the state offices, there's this idea that there are other compliance items, like annual reports, that need to be submitted in order to maintain that good standing. And through CSC, we can help you file them, provide a calendar of all that information. You can have that real-time visibility into the statuses of those filings and anything that's really going on. So you can think of your insurance license solution or the outsourcing solution very similarly to the annual reports. The biggest difference is just there's a lot less information that's involved or a little bit of a different information, and it's filed with a different department.

So the idea behind this is that CSC can support in your compliance strategy really any part of that insurance license compliance landscape for you. So when you do need to register, we can help you register. We can file the paperwork for you. We can act as your agent. We store all of that. And then simply we can help maintain the compliance, not only with the department of insurance but also with those state offices. So when you're thinking about those continuums and how you're optimizing getting registered or establishing, maintaining, and monitoring, that it is something that CSC is able to do across the board throughout the idea of your compliance landscape.

And the biggest way to think about that is just centralizing the compliance within CSC. This is really for two reasons. One for centralized visibility and understanding, you have one provider that's able to support all of these things for you, so that there isn't a question as to who's doing what or where this lies. But also, this is, again, coming back to that idea of visually understanding what you have. So all of these different things that you're seeing on the screen, the renewal services or filing services, if you will, getting that visibility into what licenses you have, what's happening, and anything else about that license, down to those PDB alerts for being notified of things that are changing with your license portfolio and being able to reduce the amount of compliance risk you have from missing those items, to your registered agent services and receiving service of process, maybe not missing a judgment or something that's coming through, and certainly keeping that good standing through the annual reports. This is all centralized in one single technology.

So within our system, we have our base technology, the CSCNavigator, which would house all of this. So depending on your role maybe or even the organization as a whole, there are different links and tabs within the same platform that allow you to see all of this information at your fingertips. And then it eliminates the question as to where this information is or some of those challenges that you might have by way of data or complexities. This would all be available for you to see at any time to understand how your compliance process is working and maybe where we need to work together to fill gaps or make sure that things are going the way that they need to go.

So again, the biggest piece of this is understanding that all of those items in the compliance landscape can be part of your strategy with CSC, and they're all tied into that that same technology here. So I think that leads us to the bigger question about maybe why partner with CSC here, Brian. Anything that you want to add here and take us through the ending of the webinar.

Brian: Yeah. I think kind of some of the challenges that I spoke about earlier, that we when we talk to people, they're dealing with volumes. They're dealing with just sometimes lack of expertise, kind of just understanding how to manage the nuances and really just the data itself. So the next slide is going to be a good illustration of why companies use us in this space for all compliance, for that matter.

The big one, and Calla touched on it, is the technology, but the security of this information, where again we're talking about sensitive, personal identifying information in the insurance world, whether it's for information regarding designated responsible producers, individual data. Again, all these little unique things. CSC, when you work with us, nothing is going over just email exchange. If you do that today, by working with us, we'll talk to and kind of show you down the line ways that we securely receive that sensitive data.

Some of you might be using credit cards, getting reimbursements. Maybe individuals are doing their renewals, these producers, and they're asking you to reimburse them back. They might have different accounting IDs. Your accounting department might be doing a lot of work behind the scenes to file these licenses. With CSC, we are going to be paying those fees for you. We're not going to ask for retainers. We're not going to ask you for credit cards. So we are going to physically do all the administrative payments. We're going to do all the filings, whether it's online or overnight to the department, and ultimately giving you that visibility. For those of you that had spreadsheets, for those of you that might have multiple arms in your business managing this data, the ability to have a centralized provider for all services, but just a little click of the button, view different areas to see insurance in one spot, annual reports in another, secretary of state in a third. Just provide that that total compliance provider.

And then understanding the complexity concept, you're dealing with experts. You don't have to worry about it when you need to figure out what's needed. "Hey, we have a person. We need a surplus line license or an adjuster license in these states. I don't know what to do. Can you help me make that happen?" Your insurance contact here at CSC knows how to execute on that, and you can lean on us to do those transactions. You're adding people. Your people are getting married. They're moving. The complexity of those ad hoc life cycle things is where we step in to take that logistical process away from you so you can focus on what's important, which is selling policy and doing your other important business functions.