Release Notes Archive

The Continuing Education panel on the carrier’s view of an individual producer profile now has updated messaging for licenses where CE integration is not available (i.e., in non-Sircon states).

This updated messaging clearly indicates that automatic CE updates are not displayed because they are not available for the state. The overall behavior of the panel has not changed.

Image: Continuing Education Panel Showing Message for State Without CE Integration

A new data set is available in Interactive Reporting called "Sircon Network." This data set provides insights into which agents and agencies have a connected Sircon account, invitation and connection history, and other information related to the producer's Sircon Network status.

A carrier can now unlink a connected individual’s Sircon account from their producer record without disconnecting the entire producer record. With this option, the carrier has an easier, more targeted way to fix issues with an individual’s Sircon account link without additional unnecessary impacts.

Image: Unlink Sircon Account

Once unlinked, the carrier can send a new invite to the individual to link their producer record with the correct Sircon account.

To improve the efficiency of the license renewal process, carriers can now easily manage individuals’ overall continuing education status in all 50 states with the following capabilities:

• Automatically import and display the CE status directly from Sircon states

  

• Link to view the individual’s transcript in the remaining states, then manually update the CE status on the producer record

  

• Automatically remind individuals to complete their CE, if it has not yet been completed

  

• Monitor, verify and update the CE status for licenses that have upcoming renewals

  

NOTE: We are currently offering CE status management as an early-access capability. Please contact Vertafore if you are interested in enabling CE status management for your account.

Bulk Associations can now be added and managed in bulk by using Bulk Transactions & Service Requests. This enhancement makes it easy to save costs and effort in maintaining association information for states such as California and Washington, where agency appointments can cover individuals.

Please contact your customer account team representative for implementation details and any questions.

Quick Search now allows you to easily search for a producer from any module in Sircon for Carriers and go directly to the “New” view of the record. The new view is where, as with "Classic” Quick Search, carrier users can search for producers by name, alias, EIN, full or partial SSN, NPN, License Number, or External System ID in a single search box. The 10 best matches will be displayed in a selectable list.

We added a new Licensing category to Interactive Reporting. When you select licensing information, the report displays licenses and the associated appointments.

A carrier can now send an invite to an individual, separate from other processes such as PX requests or document sharing, to link their Sircon account to the carrier’s producer record. Once linked, the carrier and individual can share information.

A carrier can now unlink a connected agency’s Sircon account from their producer record without disconnecting the entire producer record. With this option, the carrier has an easier, more targeted way to fix issues with an agency’s Sircon account link, without causing additional unnecessary impacts.

Once unlinked, the carrier can send a new invite to the agency to link their producer record with the correct Sircon account.

Carriers can now easily share up to 10 documents at one time when sharing documents externally using Direct Sharing. This application provides an on-screen notification and sends an email to you that indicates the number of documents being shared.

Carriers can now easily attach up to 10 documents to a producer when sharing documents internally using the Internal Only tab.

To alleviate issues with missing data in producer accounts, if an individual producer’s connection to the carrier is changed from one Sircon account to another, all the documents previously shared by the carrier to the individual will be available in the new connected account.

The Producer Lack of Production Report is a new, standard report in Producer Central that uses Sales Authorization history to identify appointed producers that have not sold within a specified period. This report is available to carrier users who have an upgraded account.

This information is also available in a Bulk Appointment Termination format for easy follow-up on termination requests utilizing Sircon Standard Bulks.

How can carriers use the report? Appointment renewals cost money, so carriers can use the report to decide not to renew producers who are not selling.

You no longer need to manually update credential program information for producers who sell annuities in Florida. Producer Central synchronizes education information with ClearCert. ClearCert is a compliance certification clearinghouse for mandatory long-term care insurance.

Image: View Credential Program screen showing Florida ClearCert Program

ClearCert updates are available for all states except Vermont.

Branch information in Interactive Reporting is automatically mapped to the correct branch, even though there may be multiple branches with the same NPN.

This means the application associates appointment and demographic information with the correct branch and the information is not duplicated in the report for other branches with the same NPN.

This functionality is only available to carriers that have Branch Office Synchronization (BrOS) accounts enabled.

If carrier-agency connections are enabled and an active user in a connected agency account is having trouble logging in, a carrier can help them reset their password.

The carrier can search for the agency user from the Agency Account Information panel on the agency profile. If a matching active account is found, the application displays a Send Password Reset button.

Image: Search Agency Users showing the Send Password Reset button

Clicking the Send Password Reset button sends a password-reset email to the email address on the agency user’s account. The person can use that email to reset their password; if they ignore it, no change is made to their account.

Sole proprietors’ records in Producer Central can now be updated with PDB information. Previously, the application only checked for EIN, which in the case for sole proprietors doesn't exist. Now the application checks for an NPN if the EIN cannot be found, so sole proprietor information can be updated.

ISSUES RESOLVED

None identified for this release.

The Agency Account Information panel on the carrier’s view of an agency’s profile now includes the count of active security administrators in the agency’s connected Sircon account.

Image: Carrier View of Agency Account Information Showing Administrator Count

Clicking the View Agency Administrators link displays the names of the security administrators.

Image: View Agency Administrator Names

The carrier’s view of an agency’s profile now includes additional information about the agency’s connected Sircon account, if applicable, to help the carrier support the agency.

The profile header now displays the agency’s Sircon Account ID.

Image: Profile Header

The Overview tab now displays a new Agency Account Information panel if the agency has a connected Sircon account. The information on the panel includes the agency’s Sircon Account ID, the count of active agency users, and an option to search for a specific agency user.

Image: Agency Account Information Panel

In Interactive Reports, when you share a template or export reports the Cancel and Exit buttons are disabled during the time the action is in progress. This is to ensure that the actions are not interrupted.

Image: Buttons to cancel and exit disabled during Share Template action

The External System Business unit field now displays the Business Unit Short Name instead of the Business Unit ID in the Interactive Reporting External System ID section to be consistent with data shown in Producer Manager.

Image: Interactive Reporting – External System Business Unit

The description for the Actual Appointment Effective Date was updated to clarify that the data only shows appointments submitted through the Sircon system.

Image: Interactive Reporting – Appointment Actual Effective Date

A carrier can now see a producer’s Continuing Education (CE) information on the producer profile.

To view the Continuing Education information, the producer must have daily PDB updates enabled.

For states where the application can retrieve CE information, the producer’s CE status is displayed on the screen. Otherwise, the application displays a link to the state’s transcript search page.

The Continuing Education panel supports single resident state/license, multiple resident state/license, and designated home state scenarios.

Image: Continuing Education on Producer Profile

When the application adds a new ClearCert certification to the Third Party Certifications timeline, then the application ends the existing credential on the start date of the new credential.

The existing credential must be active and predate the new credential for this action to occur.

This change ensures that the previously existing annuities credential does not incorrectly remain active when the application adds a new credential.

Image: Sample of Third-Party Certifications for Annuities

We added Early Adopter Program Terms to the bottom of Producer Central - Producer Administration and Dashboard screens.

Image: Producer Administration footer showing link to Early Adopter Program Terms

Image: Producer Dashboard screen footer showing link to Early Adopter Program Terms

We added PDB producer data to Interactive Reporting for carrier users who have accounts that have PDB updates turned on. The new template “PDB Producer Data” includes the following information categories:

• Producer

• Appointment

  • Display third-party appointments associated with producers using Carrier Appointments field.

• Business Unit

• External System ID

• Regulatory Actions

Image: Interactive Reporting – New Template “PDB Producer Data”

Image: Sample Interactive Report Showing Carrier Appointments

Image: Sample Interactive Report Showing Regulatory Actions

You can now share Producer Documents in the following formats:

PDF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, Word, Excel, Zip, and CSV file types.

Image: File Types

The Education Credential functionality in Producer Manager did not always consider education taken prior to when a license was issued. This presented a problem for calculating an accurate time line of eligibility in some scenarios.

Now, when a program template requirement configures the coverage expiration to be based on the license renewal period, coverage will be granted for courses taken prior to license issuance.

Improvements were made to increase the performance of the Image Feed, which reduces delays in processing images and/or documents created during producer onboarding requests.

An issue was fixed with the "Recent Subscriber Notices" section in Producer Manager that caused the text to overlap the edges of the page.

There are recent instances of errors being thrown in Producer Express, when trying to connect a producer in Producer Manager, that result in the packet not going on our default five-hour hold to retry but instead going to the error queue. This resulted in needing to resolve the errors for the impacted packets.

Now, when failing to connect the producer record an automatic 30-minute hold will be triggered and the packet will retry. This should stop packets from unnecessarily going to the error queue when Producer Manager has downtime or we failed to connect the producer for another reason and prevent the need to manually resolve effected packets.

When the Name for an individual or firm is updated in Producer Manager from the PDB the casing of that name is updated to all caps casing.

Now, when pulling counts of Producers with pending updates on the PDB Updates Summary on the Producer Manager splash page, we do not include producers with only excluded state updates. This is because excluded state updates are waiting for the state to be included before processing and intentionally may not process that day.

Fixed an issue with how courses are displayed when a producer has completed more than 20 courses. The first page displayed the courses correctly, however the subsequent pages did not show the courses as expected.

Note that this was a display issue and not an issue with the underlying data. Information in reports or the outbound data feed was not affected.

There are recent instances of errors being thrown in Producer Express, when trying to connect a producer in Producer Manager, that result in the packet not going on our default five-hour hold to retry but instead going to the error queue. This resulted in needing to resolve the errors for the impacted packets.

Now, when failing to connect the producer record an automatic 30-minute hold will be triggered and the packet will retry. This should stop packets from unnecessarily going to the error queue when Producer Manager has downtime or we failed to connect the producer for another reason and prevent the need to manually resolve effected packets.

When the Name for an individual or firm is updated in PM from the PDB the casing of that name is updated to all caps casing.

Now, when pulling counts of Producers with pending updates on the PDB Updates Summary on the PM splash page, we do not include producers with only excluded state updates. This is because excluded state updates are waiting for the state to be included before processing and intentionally may not process that day.

Fixed an issue with how courses are displayed when a producer has completed more than 20 courses. The first page displayed the courses correctly, however the subsequent pages did not show the courses as expected.

Note that this was a display issue and not an issue with the underlying data. Information in reports or the outbound data feed was not affected.

Quick Search provides a single search box that allows a Producer Manger user to search for producers in the system with relative ease.  Quick Search now also can lookup producers using exact match on the Indv ID or the Firm ID.

Note: A user will only be able to search by Indv ID or Firm ID if that user is assigned to a PM security role which has the PM security function to not hide "Firm ID" and "Indv ID" fields (two separate security functions configured on the PM Maintain Security Role page)

A producer may have a "Connected" status, but for various reasons, the producer may not be able to be subscribed to receive PDB Updates when the record is initially created or connected. This means the producer will not be receiving Daily PDB Updates until they are available on the PDB, and they are subscribed through either a manual or automated process.

An issue was resolved with the automated process to subscribe connected producers who could not previously receive Daily PDB Updates to ensure that producers who can be subscribed to receive Daily PDB Updates are subscribed if they are still in the retry window.

A new report is now available to download the last 7 days of data reconciliation requests, including error message information, from Producer Manager in the System Information section of Inquiries.

This report includes the following fields:

• Producer Name

• Producer Type

• NPN

• EIN (for firm records)

• Producer Id

• Status

• Reconciliation Type

• Request Date

• Status Date

• Reviewed

• Reviewed By

• Requested By

• State

• Error Type Code

• Message

Interactive Reporting now includes all address types that are available in Producer Manager, including custom address types.

Comment, Comment Last Updated Date, and Comment Date have been added to the "Producer" section of Interactive Reporting.

Last Reconciliation Date has been added to the "Producer" section of Interactive Reporting.

Performance of The Data Reconciliation Requests page has been improved to reduce the page load time and prevent the page from timing out.

Producer Express supports the ability to receive updates from BIG (Business Information Group) on the partial results of a background investigation before the complete investigation has been completed.

Previously, we would only store and display the URL for a partial response if that response resulted in the packet going to an error status. Now, we always store and display the most recent URL for partial responses regardless of status.