As the life insurance industry grapples with a growing number of regulatory and compliance responsibilities, it’s becoming increasingly important for the industry to find efficient ways of sharing information between parties, industry executives said on Thursday.
At the Canadian Life Insurance EDI Standards (CLIEDIS) annual seminar in Toronto, Heather Clarke, vice president of I.G. Insurance Services Inc., said that as managing general agencies (MGAs) and other insurance distributors juggle a growing number of compliance responsibilities, they’re encountering problems accessing all of the data they need in order to comply.
“[There’s a] lack of information,” Clarke said. “We just don’t have the information to fulfill all of the regulatory requirements.”
Specifically, with MGAs facing more responsibilities around advisor supervision, Clarke said it’s more important than ever for those firms to have up-to-date information about each transaction their advisors conduct.
“We need to know what kind of business these people are doing,” she said, “and we need to know before it’s being processed.”
Distributors should also have ongoing access to information about the status of in-force policies that advisors have sold in the past, according to Dennis Craig, vice president of MGA and national account relationships at RBC Insurance. For instance, he said that when policies lapse or are terminated by clients, the MGAs responsible for the oversight of that business should be informed immediately. In some cases, however, MGAs are not getting access to this kind of information.
“The movement of business, in terms of what’s happening with policies coming and going, has a direct impact on how you as a distributor can meet your [compliance] obligations,” Craig said.
He said RBC Insurance and other carriers recognize the importance of providing their distribution partners with up-to-date information on policies and transactions.
“We can’t really expect an MGA to live up to its obligations if we’re not providing them with the information,” Craig said.
To help improve the quantity and quality of information that distributors are receiving, carriers are working to establish and enhance electronic feeds of data on pending applications and in-force policies. Although each carrier is at a different stage in this process, representatives from CLIEDIS said they’ve seen significant progress on these feeds in the past year.
“[We’re] seeing actual progress and implementation – [we’re] seeing those results,” said Tana Sabatino, implementation services specialist at CLIEDIS. She said electronic data feeds are valuable not only from a compliance perspective, but also as a tool for firms to manage new cases, support advisors and identify new business opportunities.
Many carriers have recently made progress, in particular, on data feeds related to electronic insurance applications (e-apps), which is encouraging for distributors. As many carriers have introduced e-apps in the past couple of years, that has enabled advisors to submit client applications directly to the carriers, and in some cases, MGAs were not being notified of these applications. That presents a problem, Clarke says, since distributors are expected to monitor and supervise that business.
“When they implemented some of the e-apps, what has been forgotten is that we have these regulatory requirements to fulfill,” said Clarke.
To address that problem, many carriers are working to establish data feeds to automatically notify their distribution partners when an e-app is submitted.
“Across the board, [carriers] are looking at e-app solutions now,” Sabatino said. “You can see that progress is being made.” She noted that CLIEDIS has launched an e-app communications best practices initiative to support carriers in this area.