(Mark Bennet of ACORD, third from left at ITC Vegas session How Insurance Firms Drive Award-Winning Customer Experiences with Data and AI. Credit: Beth Jarecki.)
ACORD Solutions Group, a subsidiary of the non-profit insurance standards organization ACORD (Pearl River, N.Y.), is making significant progress in modernizing insurance data exchange. Mark Bennett, SVP of Global Business Development at ACORD, recently shared insights into the organization’s role and ongoing efforts with Tom Benton at the InsureTech Connect 2024 Conference in Las Vegas, Nev.
Bennett emphasized ACORD’s continued focus on property and casualty insurance, noting that “those much-loved ACORD forms are still very much in circulation.” However, he pointed out that “fewer and fewer people are printing them off,” with many now exchanging them via email. Bennett noted, “If I’m a carrier and a broker’s providing me an ACORD form, historically, I have to re-key that into my core policy admin system.” ACORD has developed new technologies to help carriers deal with the challenges of data entry and forms submission intake, such as their ACORD Transcriber software.
Interoperability also remains a key focus for ACORD. Bennett noted that many organizations have different levels of messaging maturity, stating, “Some producing brokers can send digital data, which is fabulous,” he said. “However, some are still sending emails and some are still sending faxes.” ACORD’s ADEPT messaging gateway helps insurers to normalize data from these varied sources, and enables interoperability by providing a consistent data structure, regardless of their current digital capabilities. This lowers the barrier for the adoption of ACORD’s standards, including the growing community using ACORD’s Global Reinsurance and Large Commercial (GRLC) standards.
As the industry continues to evolve, Bennett says that ACORD is committed to adapting its standards and technologies to meet new challenges, including the integration of emerging technologies like AI with data standards. According to Bennett “ACORD’s investment in technology is making it easier to adopt standards.”
Bennett sees the key uses of AI as twofold: the first is providing “an enriched kind of intelligence,” for example to help an underwriter with “doing data mining, looking across historical data sets to draw out insights.” Secondly, AI can help with data extraction “helping submission intake, automating taking the data off the document” which leads to “making sure that human interaction is the focus area, allowing AI to do away with manual mining of data and data extraction processes.”
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