Affinity groups

Overview of affinity groups

In some situations, an insurer wants to process some aspect of underwriting in the same way for a specific set of policies. For examples, a specific set of policies might need access to a specific offering or may need to have rating calculated in a specific way. To identify these sets of policies, PolicyCenter uses affinity groups.

An affinity group is a named group that a policy can be added to during the processing of an associated job, such as a submission or a policy change. An affinity group can be associated with any of the following attributes:

• A producer and one or more producer codes
• A set of one or more jurisdictions
• A set of one or more products

If the affinity group specifies at least one producer code, then in order to be added to the group, the policy must be associated with one of the producer codes. The same logic is true for jurisdictions and products.

In the PolicyCenter base configuration, affinity groups are created from the Administration tab. Once they have been created, they can be associated with policies on the Policy Info step of the various job wizards, such as the Submission Wizard. However, in the base configuration, there is no special behavior given to a policy associated with an affinity group. This special behavior must be defined by the insurer through configuration.

For more information on the business functionality of affinity groups, refer to the Application Guide.

Affinity group types

Every affinity group has a type, which is set to either Open or Closed.

• An open affinity group cannot have a producer or any producer codes.
• A closed affinity group must have a producer.

In the PolicyCenter user interface, closed affinity groups must also have at least one producer code. In Cloud API, there are separate endpoints for creating an affinity group and assigning its producer codes. Therefore, you can create an affinity group through Cloud API with no producer code.