SERFF Board of Directors
Winter 2009 Meeting Summaries Index

The SERFF Board met Dec. 5 and via conference call Oct. 21.

During these meetings, Board activity covered the following:

• Strategic Planning/Development—In October, the Board was presented with an update on work with the Product Steering Committee on the forms-driven filing and concurrent rate and form review projects. The group is setting a baseline with New York and Ohio as two large states that have been asking for the concurrent rate and form review enhancement. Data modifications at the hoster sites will begin in early 2010. For the first two software releases in 2010, the staff will focus on maintenance and bug fixes. This will allow the development team time to complete the hoster data moves and continue with proof of concept work for moving individual filing data, marking state filings to conform to state data retention rules, and efforts to create automated test scripts to assist in regression testing of the SERFF application.

• SERFF Marketing—SERFF usage through October 2009 is down approximately 6% compared to the same time last year. Due to a good first quarter, usage for the first six months of 2009 was roughly 5% over the budgeted transactions; however, April through October actual transactions were less than budgeted in each month. Through October, there have been 442,315 filing transactions submitted via SERFF, as compared to 470,338 transactions for the same period last year. There have been 25 companies licensed since the Fall National Meeting. Ninety-three percent of SERFF’s more than 2,950 companies use Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).

• Implementation—Since June, staff worked with the states to implement the Medicare Supplement changes to the Uniform Product Coding Matrix. Those codes were initially to be implemented in January 2010, but the industry expressed concern with this approach at the Summer National Meeting, appealing to the Senior Issues (B) Working Group and Health Insurance and Managed Care (B) Committee to implement faster to allow companies to get products approved in time to begin marketing efforts in January. The implementation of Medicare Supplement changes to the Product Coding Matrix was completed Nov. 1. Fifty-one jurisdictions that allow filings via SERFF completed the implementation between July 1 and Nov. 1. Only five states have Speed to Market initiative implementations still incomplete. Two of those will be finished Jan. 1, 2010. Twenty-eight of 29 states requiring filing fees at the time of submission accept the payment of those fees via EFT.

• Access to SERFF Filings—In September, the Board heard from a variety of states, industry, consumer reps and vendors on the issue of allowing access to SERFF filings via the Internet for filings made publicly available by the state. In October, the Board created the Filing Access Working Group and appointed three state and three industry board members to serve. The first task of this Working Group was to document the issues identified during the forum on this topic at the Fall National Meeting. The Working Group met in November to begin this process and presented an issues list to the SERFF Board at the Winter National Meeting. The next step for the Working Group is to identify specific issues upon which to focus initial efforts.  

• 2010 SERFF Board Elections—In October, the Board was presented the nominees for positions open on the SERFF Board beginning Jan. 1, 2010. The nominating committee suggested that efforts be made to provide an application or some kind of qualifications checklist to be used when soliciting SERFF Board nominees. In December, the committee reported that the overall goal is to add some structure to the nominating process and to possibly begin the process earlier so that nominees have time to prepare a statement of qualifications.

Also in December, the Board requested the elections/appointments of Bill Lacy (AR), Fred Alvarado (Transamerica), Theresa Boyce (ACE), Robert Yass (AIA property casualty trade representative), and Commissioner Susan E. Voss (IA) be ratified by the NAIC Executive (EX) Committee. Charles Breitstadt (National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies trade representative) and Larry Mirel (Wiley Rein) requested to continue as ex-officio board members. Steve Buhr (AEGON) and Hank Edmiston (Property Casualty Insurers Association of America trade representative) declined to continue as ex-officio board members.