by Chris Newman, Managing Director, Global
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the founding of ACORD’s London Advisory Board, we are proud to look back on our work together to promote industry collaboration in the London insurance market. Despite a challenging year, we’ve made great progress.
The ACORD London Advisory Board brings together all of the major associations in the London Market, including Lloyd’s and Ruschlikon, as well as leaders from the world’s largest brokers and carriers, providing a comprehensive cross-section of insight and strategic input to ACORD.
To mark this occasion, and the beginning of 2021, we asked LAB members to reflect on their work together, some impressive and impactful London market collaborations, the challenges ahead, and how ACORD can help move innovation and modernisation forward in the coming year.
Here are a few of their reflections:
There is always a risk, when starting a new committee, that it will become a ‘talking shop’ not really achieving very much. This market collaboration has proved to be an ideal forum for ensuring full understanding of the scope and scale of what ACORD can offer along with a place where all entities can discuss how best to utilise what we already have to best serve the future of the market.
With major initiatives like Future at Lloyd’s in play, it is vital that the market collaborates to ensure that there are pragmatic standards being independently curated, and the ACORD London Advisory Board does just that. With the potential for massive advances in digital trading as a result of the current global situation, never has there been a more important time for the market to work together to ensure that we have the data standards and tools to navigate these rapidly evolving times. - Louise Day, IUA
The London Market recognises that it needs to change and modernise. It has also accepted that digitisation will be a big part of this modernisation programme. ACORD Data Standards have been at the heart of some of the most successful digitisation initiatives to date (e.g. Ruschlikon); they can play a pivotal role in helping to replace paper with data across the end-to-end London Market processes. Equally the ACORD team have great knowledge and experience that can help shape and drive modernisation and with the formation of the ACORD Solutions Group, ACORD can help with the actual technology development too.
Ruschlikon would not have achieved what it has done without ACORD. The initiative’s tag line has always been “Ruschlikon powered by ACORD” and indeed the success of the work has been marrying up the ACORD Data Standards with business process to remove paper, process hand-off’s and duplication. As a result WTW is able to move money up to 40% faster via electronic accounting than via paper accounting – quite a success story! We have seen the results / performance levels of Ruschlikon / e-Accounting actually improve significantly over the last 6 months. We have also seen a huge dependency on technology to enable people to continue to meet and discuss “face to face”. For me, the last 6 months or so have just highlighted that if we are serious in the London Market about modernising and developing then data and technology must be at the heart of this. - Richard Brame, Willis Towers Watson
Moving forward the Delegated Authority strategy [will prove to be the most impressive or impactful London market collaboration] because DA has been one of the most difficult, complex and costly areas to address, and addressing these issues requires and has required the involvement of so many different entities from brokers to carriers to Lloyd’s to software vendors. Alignment around the mission of ACORD and communication between and across the different stakeholders has been the most promising development we have achieved or goal we have set together. The key value [of ACORD] is standardised connectivity between numerous, diverse stakeholders and the greatest impact of ACORD will be in those developments that are creating that connectivity: notably Future at Lloyd’s. Many of the common Market Services on which the Market depends rely on ACORD: ACORD messages are the blood in the arteries. - Patrick Molineux, LIMOSS (London Insurance Market Operations & Strategic Sourcing)
Together, LAB and ACORD are improving integration between industry stakeholders with clear and solid support and input from the key associations in the London Market. We thank all of the LAB participants for lending their time and their insights to advancing the London market and the global ACORD community, and look forward to the continued impact of their efforts in 2021.