Maintaining your annual compliance obligations is simply part of doing business in our industry. Unfortunately, it can be a time-consuming and unproductive part of doing business if you are left to complete the processes manually and don't have the right support from your carriers.
What's more, the regulatory environment is changing continually, leaving you to monitor and stay ahead of changing compliance obligations or risk non-compliance, which can threaten your business and that of your partners.
In some recent industry-related headlines, you've seen examples of businesses (and business leaders) suffering greatly from a failure to prioritize compliance. While these events have been about much more than just missing compliance deadlines or inaccurate data entry, they show how compliance missteps can seriously derail people and companies. In addition, the aftermath will likely be even tighter compliance regulations going forward, as evidenced by the most recent DOL ruling.
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Yes, licensing will always take up some of your time. But in in a world of cloud-based computing and apps for everything, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel every year. There are best practices, automated tools and streamlined processes that can dramatically reduce both the time you spend on licensing tasks and the risks of noncompliance for you and your carriers.
With good agents in high demand, carriers must make themselves competitive and appealing to attract your talent. This gives you negotiating power to request streamlined licensing processes and tools. You should not only expect technology to be available to help you, you should demand it, because it will make you a more productive agent. The less time devoted to licensing, the more time you have to sell — but doing it right is good for everyone.
As a producer, what should you be expecting in terms of compliance support from your partners?
- Support with your licensing obligations should start at onboarding. The less manual data entry and spreadsheet wrangling you are responsible for, the less time the process takes and the lower the chance of an inadvertent error.
- Your carriers should provide you with tools that are easy to use and don't require you to fill out stacks of forms. You should be primarily verifying data, not entering it yourself, with just one ID number to keep track of.
- Tools should also have compliance updates built in — so you can be confident you are meeting the latest requirements.
- Some sort of tickler system is a must to help you remember key dates, deadlines, and documentation so items don't fall through the cracks. An automated system should alert you by email when it's time for you to complete a licensing task, or advance notifications when the requirements for your current licenses have changed.
- A central repository with access to outside applications will make assembling your key compliance data a much more streamlined process. It should contain past record information on licenses, CEUs and other information you would have received from entities in support of your license, numerical information on performance from the previous year and commission levels, all in one place and one system. All this information should be at your fingertips and easily accessible to export and provide to regulators/auditors.
A flexible technology solution that streamlines the credentialing process for you is the sign of an insurance company that not only values your time, but also respects the importance of auditability and compliance as fundamental to business health. That's how you want to do business — and with whom you would partner.
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