Security & Privacy
The SEMCAT Team recognizes the requirement for security & privacy in any solution you plan to adopt in your agency. SEMCAT has been developed from the ground up with security in mind. Our security & privacy practices exceed industry security requirements and have passed review from insurance carriers, banking and financial institutions, independent agencies and agency groups, and independent external auditors. Below please find a few brief statements about various aspects of our security & privacy practices.
SEMCAT & Your Customer Data
The data you enter into SEMCAT is stored for your benefit, and may be accessed and modified by you at any time using SEMCAT with an active account. Your clients' non-public private information will not be sold, transferred, or made available in any form to third parties except at your explicit request.
Your customer data is stored in a secured, SAS70 Type II compliant datacenter, with protections in place against all manner of risks. Our specific cloud-based server implementation allows us to maintain over 99.9% uptime and provides exceptional data backup and redundancy to protect against and recover from any hardware failures. Within this infrastructure, your private customer information is encrypted during transfer and storage, and is keyed to your account alone.
Using SEMCAT, you can eliminate the Post-It notes, Excel spreadsheets, and e-mail chains commonly found in an agency's sales and prospect management process. SEMCAT allows you to remove your customer information from these insecure mediums, and restrict access to only your authorized agents and CSRs. Additionally, actions conducted within SEMCAT can be tracked and audited, and access can be immediately restricted at your request - ensuring your customer information doesn't walk out the door with a disgruntled former employee.
SEMCAT & Your Carrier Logins
In SEMCAT, you will authenticate with your own carrier-provided credentials to access the carrier’s web site for quoting. The credentials you enter in SEMCAT’s web browser are optionally storable for your benefit. Any stored credentials are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption in transit and at rest. Stored credentials and other encrypted information are not accessible by SEMCAT Staff.
SEMCAT Quoting
The quoting transaction within SEMCAT maintains the entirety of the carrier’s usual security procedures, including agent specific authentication, HTTPS/SSL connections, and all other facets of the carrier’s typical workflow in a regular quoting session in Internet Explorer. The client information transfers directly from your computer to the carrier's web site, and is not proxied through our servers. SEMCAT employees do not have access to your account on the carrier's quoting site, and SEMCAT does not have the functionality to extract any data from the carrier’s quoting site.
SEMCAT Usage Auditing & Statistics
The SEMCAT servers track activities such as SEMCAT logins, quoted carriers, and feature usage (such as how often quotes are printed). These logged activities provide us with a powerful security auditing tool, as well as the means to provide adequate support, to analyze quote patterns, and to provide you with usage statistics (quotes per month, quotes per company, etc).
SEMCAT Web Entry Form
The Web Entry Form is SEMCAT's online client entry form for agency websites which streams incoming client leads from your website directly to your SEMCAT Lead Inbox. The customer data is encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption and secured via SSL during transmission. Data entered by an end consumer into your agency's Web Entry Form is treated with the same security precautions as data entered directly into SEMCAT.
SEMCAT Software Installation & Requirements
- SEMCAT is a Windows desktop application usable on local desktop and terminal server computers. SEMCAT works with all common Windows environments from Windows XP to Windows 7.
- SEMCAT requires a computer with the following specifications: (1.5 ghz cpu, 256 mb RAM free, 100 mb Hard Drive storage free) and a broadband internet connection (>256 kilobits per second). Computers with greater specifications will perform better.
- A virus scanner and personal firewall are strongly recommended. Firewalls need to allow SEMCAT.exe, SEMCATBrowser.exe, and XULRunner.exe to access the internet to enable SEMCAT functionality. Traffic to *.semcat.net also needs to be allowed.
- The SEMCAT application "installs" to the users' roaming application data folder, and requires no special permissions in typical situations.
- The SEMCAT installer simply unpacks the SEMCAT application files to the roaming application data directory and makes one non-critical registry modification (in order to provide an uninstallation option in Add/Remove Programs)
SEMCAT Software Updates
SEMCAT is built to automatically update when a new version is made available for our general agency base. Our automatic updates ensure your SEMCAT Software remains up-to-date and provide access to any new features and functionality. Since there are no registry changes, the only changes with an update are simply the modification of files in the user's roaming application data directory.
Remote Support
In order to provide training and support, the SEMCAT Support Team uses a remote desktop solution provided by LogMeIn. This solution allows the SEMCAT representative to "sit down" next to you remotely and view your screen during a call. To start the remote support session, our Support Team may ask you to visit http://semcat.net/install. This solution is web-browser based, requires no software installation, and generally requires no firewall modification.
Further Questions?
We hope we have addressed the primary privacy & security concerns above! If you have any further questions regarding our practices in this arena, please contact your SEMCAT Representative or e-mail the SEMCAT Team at .
