December 13, 2016

ACORD2016 Conference Recap: What's to come on L&A automation

By: Tim Owen

As many of you may be aware, members of the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, more simply known as ACORD, work tirelessly to improve data exchange and workflows within the insurance industry. By developing electronic standards and standardized forms, ACORD aims to assist carriers and distributors alike in streamlining their business processes, including those related to compliance.

The organization's members are also avid promoters of technology that aims to improve these workflows, hence Vertafore's involvement. My involvement specifically is with license and appointment standards and automation. Working with Yolanda Austin from ACORD and Jon Volpe from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), we presented an update on work we are doing in conjunction with the Insured Retirement Institute (IRI). Jeanann Smith, also from DTCC, and I are co-chairs for IRI's license and appointment automation working group. This working group's goals in particular are to drive up the adoption and benefits of license and appointment automation, by driving down the cost of automation.

ACORD2016: The Future of License & Appointment Automation

At the conference, Jon, Yolanda, and I discussed the state of L&A appointment automation and continuing industry challenges. These challenges include:

• Inaccurate or out of date information
• Different rules by state and various interpretations of those rules
• Difficulty in accessing and sharing information

In order to address these challenges, we created an industry briefing paper that lays out the vision and a 3-year roadmap for addressing these challenges. The first three initiatives currently in progress include:

• Creating a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) tool for license and appointment automation to help organizations understand justify automation initiatives.
• Creating a reference model to simplify and more clearly standardize license and appointment business processes to drive more effective automation.
• Establishing a vision and plan for more effective information sharing and access between carriers and distributors.

Key to Success

The key to success is adoption– the key to adoption is lowering the cost of automation through use of business process / scenario driven standards and better access to current information. The working group, as stated before, has put together a vision and 3-year roadmap to achieve the vision.

So, if you're not already involved, get involved! If you are interested in getting involved or at least leveraging our work, please let me know or, click here to learn more on the State of License and Appointment Processing from the 2016 IRI Briefing Paper.

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