There were two announcements recently that should help accelerate the adoption of ACORD standards within the London Market. Firstly, Xchanging and Web Connectivity jointly announced that London Market messages would be available in ACORD format within the first half of this year. Secondly, Lloyd’s announced that support for LDEX would be withdrawn by IBM by 1st July and that the necessary upgrades will not be made, leaving those who want to rely solely on LDEX in a precarious position.

On the 20th Feb 2008, Xchanging and Web Connectivity announced they had ‘teamed up’ to provide underwriters and brokers the option of receiving their bureau messages in ACORD format rather then existing ‘EDIFACT’ EDI format. Jonathan Bradshaw, MD of Xchanging In-sure Services commented that “this is an important step forward to help give impetus to simplifying infrastructure and streamlining of processes and adoption of ACORD in London”. I think he is right.

Xchanging will distribute these ACORD messages via Xchanging’s ACORD Gateway (XAG - provided by Web Connectivity) to underwriters. This service, known as ACORD4ALL, allows Xchanging to deliver legacy EDI messages as their ACORD equivalents. Already, over 50,000 ACORD DRI messages per week are processed by Xchanging into the Insurers' Market Repository, powered by Web Connectivity's EnabledB2B Gateway.

James Willison, managing director Web Connectivity said, “Removing Londonisms in the London market is another key step forward in the market reform cycle, to which we are proud to contribute.”

When you juxtaposition this offering with the fact that the version of LDEX in use has become obsolete to the point where IBM will no longer support it, the use of ACORD has just been given a ‘shot in the arm’. Not that, in my opinion, it needs it; it is just that sometimes people need a sense of impending crisis to focus the mind – rather like a student forced into revision by the looming exam.

The reason that I think ACORD makes perfect sense stems from ‘real life’ experiences that have shown us that, without such standards, any form of data exchange is much more difficult. Scyllogis has a number of current assignments to automate data exchange between our clients and their trading partners. The recurring obstacle to a speedy conclusion to these assignments is not the time it takes to build the software to process the data, it is the prolonged test and fix iterations that ensue because of ‘misunderstandings’ or incompatible data structures.

Any lingua franca for data exchange is hugely beneficial; ACORD has the advantage of being ‘spoken’ in the US, Bermuda and a number of other, rapidly growing, geographies. Scyllogis expects to be involved in a number of ACORD based initiatives in the near future and we actively encourage the use of this standard when our clients discuss data exchange with their trading partners.
Therefore, we welcome anything that gives the market an impetus to move in a common direction in this regard. Maybe the market should simply ‘pull the plug’ on all formats other than ACORD; I remember when that had to be done with punched cards.