Working with affinity groups

Some insurers write policies based on the insured belonging to a certain group. For these insurers, the lines of business in the base configuration enable you to associate an affinity group with a policy. Affinity groups are defined in the Administration > Users & Security > Affinity Groups tab. You must have the Affinity Group Administration permission. On the Policy Info screen, you can select an affinity group from those that meet required criteria (product line, producer code, and date range) and associate it with a policy.

You can associate an affinity group to a policy from among a set of affinity groups that have been defined. In the default configuration, selecting an affinity group does not cause any changes to the policy. Through configuration, you can use affinity groups to compute a dividend, select an offering, or change how premiums are calculated for members of the group.

The Affinity Group Administration (affinitygroupadmin) permission controls whether a user can administer affinity groups. In the default configuration, the Community Admin and Underwriting Supervisor have this permission.

Creating a new affinity group

To create a new affinity group, navigate to the Administration tab and select New Affinity Group from the Actions menu. This command appears only if you have affinitygroupadmin permission. Selecting this command displays the New Affinity Group screen where you can define a new affinity group.

The New Affinity Group screen in the Administration tab (NewAffinityGroup.pcf) displays four tabs:

Basics – Basic information about the affinity group including name, type, producer organization, contact, and start/end dates. Leave the dates blank to enable the affinity group to be applied to any policy effective date.
Jurisdictions – The states in which the affinity group can be applied. Leave blank to enable the affinity group to be applied to all states.
Products – The lines of business in which the affinity group can be applied. Leave blank to enable the affinity group to be applied in all lines of business.
Producer Codes – The producer codes for which the affinity group can be applied. Leave blank if you are defining an open affinity group that you want any producer to be able to use.

The Name and Type (Open or Closed) are required fields. Additionally, if you set the type to Closed, validation requires that you specify an Organization and at least one Producer Code. Each additional detail that you include in an affinity group definition further restricts its availability accordingly. For example, if you specify a start and end date, the affinity group is unavailable to a user writing a policy with an effective date outside this range of dates.

Searching for affinity groups

An Affinity Groups command appears in the left sidebar of the Administration tab. This command appears only if you have affinitygroupadmin permission. Selecting this command displays the Affinity Groups search screen where you can search for affinity groups and view or edit those that are found.

The Affinity Groups search screen (SearchAffinityGroup.pcf) enables you to search by several criteria, and to search for only available groups. The Search Only Available Groups option restricts the search to affinity groups whose date range, if specified, includes today’s date.