Agents and brokers licensed in Pennsylvania will have their producer licensing renewals shifted to their birth month, starting later this year.

The Pennsylvania Insurance Department will eliminate renewals tied to the month in which a person was first licensed.

The change to birth-date renewals will put Pennsylvania in line with producer licensing uniformity standards created by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents all state insurance commissioners.

The shift is expected to begin in November and be completed by March 2010, at which time all licensed producers will be forced to renew their licenses during their birth month, according to the insurance department and industry sources.

The Pennsylvania Insurance Department’s Licensing and Enforcement Bureau is “ramping up” for the change and plans a number of efforts to both inform and educate producers, according to spokeswoman Melissa Fox.

Representatives of the Insurance Agents & Brokers of Pennsylvania met with the insurance department in May to discuss the change, then notified its membership in its weekly e-newsletter May 14.

Jason Ernest, IA&B vice president of advocacy, said the insurance department appears to have a plan that “was well thought out and that will create minimal, if any, interruption for agents.”

The group is looking forward to the benefit to agents who have birth-date renewal times in several other states.

“Overall, we applaud the department’s move toward uniformity,” Ernest said. “Of course for this to work, all states need to implement the change. Certainly it helps that Pennsylvania is taking the initiative.”

Vince Phillips, a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Association of Health Underwriters, said he hoped the insurance department “puts its outreach efforts to the producer community to mitigate the unavoidable confusion and possible consternation of some producers who will be caught unawares.”

PAHU “has pledged to do its part in making sure that producers understand the new system,” he said. Phillips included news of the change in a newsletter that goes to PAHU members in May.

Jan Hartman

The Pennsylvania chapter of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors also looks forward to the move.

“NAIFA is supportive of the change from the point of view of uniformity,” Jan Hartman, its executive vice president, said in an email. “The department has done its due diligence and has learned lessons from the other states who have already made the change. They are working to make this change as painless as is possible.”

Under the 1999 Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, the majority of states were required to have reciprocity requirements in place within three years, although not all states have shifted their registration renewals to the birth month.

This story originally appeared in the July 2009 print edition of Insurance & Financial Advisor.