The National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR) has announced an important pending retirement.
It’s not a commissioner. Or an employee. Rather, it’s the retirement of the Company Specialized Report, or CSR, a report companies could run for anywhere from 1 to 50,000 national producer numbers (NPNs) at a time. In June 2022, NIPR announced the program would retire effective June 1, 2024.
The two-year notice intends to give any companies that rely on the CSR for core processes time to migrate to other solutions without a significant interruption to their business.
Many companies use the CSR to get point-in-time updates on their producer force, to check license maintenance information, particularly line of authority information and regulatory actions.
What is the NIPR CSR?
Companies that need single reports on their producer force have historically been able to access them via the CSR. Using the report function at NIPR, companies can request four of the following 11 different data points about their producers.
- License class
- License expiration date
- License issue date
- License active status
- Resident / non-resident license number
- LOA active status
- LOA issue date
- Regulatory Information Retrieval System (RIRS) penalties/fines/forfeitures
- Reason for action
- RIRS date of action from/to
- RIRS effective date from/to
Companies using the CSR can manually enter producer information – NIPR has specific criteria for what you need, such as Social Security number, national producer number (NPN), name, etc. – in a specific order into the CSR request. You can copy-paste up to 10 NPNs at a time, or upload a CSV file with up to 50,000 names and NPNS to request data.
Since not all states participate in NIPR services such as the RIRS, a CSR may still not be completely reflective of a given producer’s full insurance licensure profile, but a single report for $50 could provide a check for agencies and insurers handling 50,000 NPNs or fewer manually.
Why is NIPR discontinuing the CSR?
Straight from the news release by Karen Stakem Hornig, NIPR CEO, and Valeria Williams, Director of Business Development and Customer Experience:
“We have diligently reviewed existing product offerings and found opportunities for future product enhancement and development. The Company Specialized Report (CSR) was identified as a product that no longer effectively and efficiently meets industry compliance needs.”
Realistically, the industry is awakening to the possibilities of digital infrastructure that allow you to do much more than draw four pieces of information per NPN. At one point, having low-touch, irregular data draws was adequate, but as technology makes data more immediate and accessible, regulatory expectations of having a more robust data pipeline and more regular updates are becoming the norm in the industry.
How have companies been using the CSR?
Many companies using the CSR have done so for decades. These single-point data checks help verify agent licensure, determine if an agent has been penalized for an insurance violation, or otherwise check whether a producer is in good standing.
For companies that still manage their producer suitability data on spreadsheets or paper, via manual data entry, the CSR is one of the “way we’ve always done things” suite of processes.
However, the CSR as a compliance check is incredibly limited. Four data points hardly give a holistic picture of an agent’s license. And red-flagging violations or expired licenses that may have happened months ago isn’t that helpful and provides very little protection if it means you end up allowing an agent to sell or even advertise sales for months beyond the point of license lapse or revocation.
With a few major contributing factors for how a producer can lose their license, you don’t want to be the last to know when a member of your producer force is in violation.
How can we replace our CSR products?
For companies that have been working with the CSR, the pressure is on to move to a different compliance process over the next two years. While two years may seem like a sufficient timeline to some, plenty of tech buying cycles are more like a half-decade long. Two years may only constitute one budget cycle at your organization.
But no pressure.
Frankly, the same market pressures that have pushed NIPR to discontinue the CSR can also help your organization – digital solutions that bring automation, auto-fill, and all the other awesome autos to the table. Of course we’re biased, but AgentSync has a number of features that out of the box can help your organization compete at a higher level.
- Daily synchronization with NIPR, so your data is always up-to-date
- More information – don’t limit yourself to four data points when you want it all
- Robust reporting, so you can use your own data to work smarter not harder
- Full-organization Scorecard summary, so you can visualize the compliance health of your organization
- Bulk upload, so you can get started with all your NPNs on Day 1
If you’ve been relying on the CSR and are nervous about how to migrate to a new system, there are some basics of data cleanup that you can get started on even in spreadsheets.
If you’re ready to explore what AgentSync can do to help you, check out our solutions.
The most important insurance news,in your inbox every business day.
Get the insurance industry’s trusted newsletter
