Data Format Libraries

Complex Data Exchange Solutions for ACORD

The insurance industry is transforming itself into a low-touch, high-margin business thanks to online channels, customer self-service, and straight-through processing (STP). But companies that seek to realize the full competitive potential of these new technologies and practices are often frustrated by legacy systems and fragmented manual processes.

To implement these new practices, improve efficiency, and reduce costs, insurers are adopting the ACORD standard. ACORD enables standards-based information exchange and integration among agents, brokers, service bureaus, and key third parties. ACORD can also help integrate internal systems to provide the foundation for a common enterprise information model.

Challenges
To take full advantage of ACORD standardization, enterprises must overcome four challenges:

• Exchanging information among partners who use different versions of ACORD
• Efficiently incorporating ACORD deviations and extensions
• Moving common non-ACORD protocols into ACORD
• Connecting legacy systems to ACORD

The Complex Data Exchange Solution
Complex Data Exchange Solutions for ACORD make ACORD adoption and integration cost-effective for companies of all sizes. Developed by Informatica, the leader in complex data transformation, the solution enables companies to bypass hand-coding and implement essential ACORD data transformation rapidly and cost effectively.

By leveraging Complex Data Exchange for ACORD data transformation, insurers benefit from:

• Increased marketing exposure to prospective customers, agents, and brokers through automated, standards-based interfaces
• Faster cycle times for quoting, underwriting, and issuing policies
• Reduced IT costs through the consolidation of data around ACORD models

Complex Data Exchange Solutions for ACORD is packaged for rapid installation and cost-effective maintenance. It delivers the following capabilities:

• Turnkey compatibility among all ACORD versions for effective integration and communication with business partners, and rapid online inclusion of new partners
• Data validation to ensure structural and semantic data integrity and support a trusted information architecture
• Automatic transformation of messages between extended ACORD implementations, such as those used by states or channel partners, to support STP and reduce the cost of maintaining these connections
• Connection with legacy systems, COBOL, and other industry standards for leverage of existing investments