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ACORD Standards Time

When American insurers think of standards, only one name is spoken: ACORD.The organization that cut its teeth on paper forms is now moving the insurance-technology ...

By Robert Regis Hyle | Updated on April 30, 2003

When American insurers think of standards, only one name is spoken: ACORD.The organization that cut its teeth on paper forms is now moving the insurance-technology clock forward,thanks to the development of its XML standards. The time for a single language of insurance has arrived,but there is a big step that still remainsimplementation.

You can dress up your business processes with the latest technology, but in many ways the problems of today are similar to the problems of 30 years ago. Weve come a long way, says Mele Lynn Fuller, Safeco Corporations director of agency interface and insurance standards. The thing that is interesting, though, is that the problems are the same. Weve just got better tools to solve the problems. One of todays larger continuing problems involves communication, particularly between carriers and agencies. Fuller says the tool helping to bridge that communication gap is XML (eXstensible Markup Language), the language of insurance.XML has become a part of the insurance landscape largely due to the efforts of ACORD, the nonprofit insurance association whose mission is to facilitate the development and use of standards for the insurance and financial services industries. There are other insurance standards organizations in the world, but in the United States ACORD has achieved preeminent status. In his study last year on ACORD XML standards for Celent Communications, analyst Matt Josefowicz wrote, Even though XML can enable disparate systems to speak to one another, they cant understand each other unless they are using a common vocabulary. ACORD XML standards maintain a common vocabulary of data and transaction types, enabling insurers to dramatically reduce the difficulty and expense of data interchange and systems interoperability, and cut systems integration costs significantly.

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