NAIC: Good News, Bad News For Electronic Filing

By Michael Ha

NU Online News Service, June 14, 3:27 p.m. EDT, San Francisco?Despite complaints by some insurers that it's too costly and cumbersome, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners reported its System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing is surging in popularity.[@@]

During the past five months, more than 50,000 SERFF filings were submitted?almost twice as many as recorded during the comparable period last year, NAIC said.

The NAIC also said it is anticipating some 155,000 filings to be submitted in total for full-year 2004. In comparison, some 76,000 filings were channeled through SERFF during all of 2003.

The NAIC said an increasing number of state regulators and insurers see the system as a much-needed solution for addressing cost efficiency, accuracy and the ease of status tracking.

Currently, 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico accept SERFF filings. Of those, 50 jurisdictions accept property-casualty filings, 48 accept life-insurance filings, and 42 take health-insurance filings. The NAIC also said that over 1,300 insurers are currently licensed to use SERFF, and for filings submitted via SERFF, the average turnaround time in the filing review cycle is only 23 days.

"SERFF is a one-stop, single point of electronic filing system for insurance products," said NAIC Vice President and North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Jim Poolman. "Ultimately, SERFF is designed to improve the efficiency of the rate and form filing and approval processes and to reduce the time involved in making regulatory filings."

But despite its growing success, there are still some obvious shortcomings to SERFF, a trade group representative observed. One lapse is that for many insurers, SERFF still isn't compatible with their own back office, said Lenore Marema, vice president of industry and regulatory affairs at the Des Plaines, Ill.-based Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

"SERFF speeds up the back-office process in state insurance departments if you can file electronically," Ms. Marema said. But the problem is that for most PCI members, SERFF doesn't hook up to their back office. "So you have to have two systems?you have to have computers for SERFF, and then you have to have your own system."

The NAIC is currently working on this problem and is busy developing an application program interface?also called API?that can connect SERFF to the industry's back offices, but it still doesn't exist.

Another problem is that while the NAIC is making great strides with SERFF, not all states accept SERFF filings for all lines. Ms. Marema said that complex commercial coverages are very difficult to file through SERFF and that, in fact, most states really don't take those filings.

"So you have got to do paper filing," she said, "and you've got to do electronic filing. So why not just do all paper? That's where many companies come down in terms of cost. Why Use SERFF?"

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NAIC: Good News, Bad News For Electronic Filing

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