As the licensing and education manager
for the state insurance commissioner’s office, I’d like to take a moment to
bring the NAIFA membership up to date on what’s happening within my program –
and to ask for your input.
Online Licensing – The OIC has prioritized moving the licensing processes online since
2007. Progress over the past six years
has been steady, building our online services piece by piece. I am pleased to
inform you that at the end of May 2013, more than 99 percent of all state insurance licensing transactions
are being completed online. As a result, in most cases it’s now significantly
faster to obtain or renew an insurance license.
I would like your feedback on your experiences with the online licensing
system. What can we do to make it better or easier for you to use? Most of our best ideas for improvements come
from those that use our system. Send us
your suggestions!
Electronic Fingerprinting – The latest piece of the online initiative has been electronic
submission of fingerprints. Washington
residents are required to submit fingerprints for a state and federal
background check as a part of the application process. As a result, background results have been
returned to the OIC within the same day as the fingerprints were submitted for
a large percentage of applicants. This
is a significant improvement over the 2-3 week for returned results for
hardcopy fingerprints. At the end of May
2013, 94% of all fingerprints were submitted electronically.
Should you or your agency decide to
hire additional licensees, I would encourage you to recommend submitting
electronic fingerprints. A potential
hire can schedule their fingerprinting appointment at the same time as their
licensing exam (the equipment is located in the Pearson VUE exam centers) or
choose from more than 20 other locations around the state . For a complete list of locations, please
visit our website (www.insurance.wa.gov).
Free-form Email project – This project was created to allow the insurance
commissioner’s office a streamlined method to directly email our licensees, and
this is another situation in which we’d like to get your feedback.
Here’s the background: While we have been able to send mass email out
previously, the process was antiquated and time consuming. To remedy that, we had a free-form email function
built directly into our computerized licensing system. This allows us to create, send, and document
correspondence to our licensees. It also
provides us with many filtering options to reach different sets of recipients.
For example, we can choose recipients by license type, by state, by lines of
authority, by education provider type, or even limit it to specific counties in
WA. The choices can be very selective or include
all licensees, and will automatically note on each licensee’s record the date
and subject of the email sent.
We will be soft-launching the project in the coming weeks with an email
to all licensees regarding travel licenses.
Going forward, we’ll assess how to best utilize this tool and I’m asking
for your feedback:
1) What types of notices would you prefer to receive from the OIC? (Examples – law/rule
changes, change in licensing processes, etc.)
2) How often would you want to receive
email notices from the OIC? (Suggestions include
sending a notice whenever there is
an update, only sending notice once per month with multiple updates, only once per quarter with multiple updates, or some other frequency)
No one appreciates having their inbox routinely flooded with
messages. On the other hand, no one
wants to discover being out of compliance due to not being informed of changes.
We want to strike the right balance so that we have an informed community of
producers without sending too much. This is why I’m asking you to take a moment
to consider the options and provide your feedback.
Jeff Baughman, Licensing Information
Licensing & Education Program
Manager licinfo@oic.wa.gov Office of the Insurance Commissioner 360-725-7144
State of Washington
jeffb@oic.wa.gov
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