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AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2001 Awards: Special Recognition Award

WINNER Texas: SERFF
[Download Nomination - Word]
The process of regulating insurance in the United States is a complex one. When insurance companies want to sell a new product, change the provisions of an old product, or change a product's pricing, they generally have to get approval from the regulators in each of the states in which that product is sold to put the product on the market. In the rate and form filing process, companies seek approval to sell insurance products within the individual regulatory jurisdictions. Companies currently use a variety of paper-based or automated tools to develop their insurance products. But from that point on little or no automation is used in the review and approval cycle.

The System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing (SERFF) is the first effort by states and the insurance industry to replace the paper-based infrastructure with an automated system. The SERFF system uses the technology of the Internet to enable companies to send to states and for states to receive, comment on, and approve or reject, insurance industry rate and form filings without the creation of paper.

SERFF is a distributed, Web-based application built on a Lotus Notes platform. All that is necessary at an end-user's site to be able to use the system is an up-to-date browser (IE or Netscape) and a host site for their remote database. Each SERFF customer (state and industry) has their own secure filings database with all rate and form filing data housed within. All states and companies share a database containing the filing requirement information for each state. Because there is no central repository for filing data, a combination of replication and mail routing tasks are used to keep data in synch on the many customer databases. Industry customers are hosted by a certified SERFF hosting provider qualified to set up and administer the SERFF application on the company's behalf. States are hosted by the NAIC. Additionally, a Hub Server sits at the NAIC to route traffic between servers and to manage replication between servers. All transactions within the SERFF system are encrypted and secure.

Using SERFF, a company logs on and creates a filing, consisting of electronic transmittal headers (facts and demographics about the filing) and electronic attachments which constitute the filing itself. SERFF seeks to eliminate the so-called "desk drawer rules"—unpublished filing requirements that take companies by surprise—in an effort to shorten the product to market cycle. All states using SERFF are required to have checklists for companies to use in determining the completeness of the filing. Only when the checklist is fully filled out will SERFF allow a filing to be sent, eliminating the time wasting "paper chase" so common in the paper-based system. The insurance products for which approval is being sought are put into Adobe's PDF format. When the filing is submitted, an entry is made into a filing tracking database so that the company and state alike have access to the same information about the status of the filing.

Contact Information: Andy Robinson, Director of Information Services, Texas Department of Insurance, Information Services Division, 333 Guadalupe St. Austin, TX 78701, (512) 463-6443, Fax: (512) 475-1919, andy.robinson@tdi.state.tx.us