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What Is the 2025 ACORD Student Challenge?
The ACORD Student Challenge is designed to engage the next generation of insurance professionals in the real-world process of industry standards development. The challenge invites students to apply their analytical, technical, and creative skills to a pressing contemporary insurance topic. For the 2025 Challenge, that topic is pet insurance.
Who Is ACORD? What Do We Do?
ACORD, the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, is the non-profit, global standards-setting body for the insurance industry. Since its founding in 1970, ACORD has played a critical role in facilitating the exchange of information within the insurance ecosystem. We accomplish this by developing and maintaining an extensive suite of data standards, forms, and solutions that foster efficiency, consistency, and interoperability across carriers, agents, brokers, reinsurers, technology providers, and other stakeholders.
Today, ACORD Standards are recognized and adopted by thousands of organizations in over 100 countries. Our mission is to enable better processes, better data, and better outcomes throughout the insurance value chain. By providing the frameworks and tools for standardized data exchange, ACORD helps organizations reduce administrative burden, minimize errors, accelerate transactions, and ultimately serve customers more effectively. Whether it is property & casualty, life & annuity, or reinsurance, ACORD drives the digital transformation of the insurance industry.
Our Standards Development Process
The heart of ACORD’s work lies in our process of developing and maintaining industry standards. This process is collaborative, transparent, and consensus-driven. We gather input from our global community of members, which includes insurers, agents, brokers, reinsurers, solution providers, and regulatory bodies. The standards development process typically follows these steps:
- Needs Assessment: Identifying areas where standardization can yield measurable benefits for the industry.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Forming working groups that include subject-matter experts, business analysts, and technologists.
- Drafting and Review: Developing initial standards documentation, soliciting public comments, and iterating based on feedback.
- Validation and Testing: Piloting the standards with real-world data and use cases to ensure effectiveness and usability.
- Publication and Adoption: Finalizing the standards and providing implementation guidance, training, and support.
Tangible outputs of this process include the ACORD Data Standards, ACORD Forms, and other tools. ACORD Standards encompass an exceptionally diverse range of insurance lines, reflecting the complexity and breadth of the industry. Key lines of business include:
- Property & Casualty: personal auto, homeowners, commercial property, workers compensation, professional liability, general liability, cyber, commercial auto, and dozens of other lines
- Life & Annuity: term life, whole life, variable life, annuities
- Reinsurance: treaty, facultative, pro rata, XOL
2025: Focus on Pet Insurance
Pet insurance is one of the fastest-growing segments, reflecting shifting consumer attitudes and societal changes. Pet care has soared in recent years, and with it, the demand for comprehensive insurance products that safeguard the health and wellbeing of animals. Pet insurance policies cover a range of risks, from routine veterinary care to accidents, illnesses, and even behavioral therapy.
Pet insurance helps cover the cost of veterinary care for animals – primarily cats and dogs. Like health insurance for humans, pet insurance reimburses pet owners for a portion of eligible medical expenses resulting from illness, accidents and preventive care.
Globally, premiums totaled more than $21 billion in 2024, and have been growing 12% annually, with acceleration expected. This robust growth is being driven by several key factors, including a rising global pet population, increased adoption of insurance in underpenetrated markets, escalating veterinary care costs, strategic expansion by major insurers, and the growing humanization of pets.
ACORD is responding to this dynamic market, and the needs of our members, by developing and updating standards and data elements specific to pet insurance, helping insurers rapidly introduce new products and seamlessly interact with partners and customers.
How Does the ACORD Student Challenge Work?
Participants are tasked with investigating the data requirements for underwriting pet insurance, leveraging publicly available resources and applying modern data science techniques, including the use of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Inputs:
- Publicly Available Information: Many insurance carriers provide pet insurance application forms and related information on their websites. These documents reveal the typical data elements collected by insurers, such as pet breed, age, medical history, owner information, and desired coverage types.
- Knowledge from LLMs: Large Language Models trained on extensive insurance-related data can interpret application forms, regulatory guidelines, and best practices. LLMs can help synthesize and recommend comprehensive lists of required data elements and identify emerging trends in underwriting criteria.
Outputs:
- Comprehensive List of Data Elements: Students are expected to produce a detailed, logically organized inventory of the data fields necessary for underwriting pet insurance. This list should be grouped into logical blocks, such as Applicant Details, Pet Information, Health History, Coverage Selection, and Payment Information. Each block should contain related data elements, for example:
- Applicant Details: Name, Address, Contact Information
- Pet Information: Name, Species, Breed, Age, Gender, Color
- Health History: Pre-existing Conditions, Vaccination Status, Current Medications
- Coverage Selection: Type of Coverage, Limits, Deductibles, Add-ons
- Payment Information: Billing Method, Frequency, Payment Authorization
- Prompt Engineering: Students must craft effective prompts to guide the information-gathering process, whether querying LLMs, scraping application forms, or synthesizing data from multiple carriers. These prompts should be specific, clear, and designed to extract all relevant underwriting criteria.
- Process Documentation: Documenting the steps undertaken is essential. This includes identifying sources, formulating prompts, collecting and consolidating data, organizing elements into logical blocks, and validating findings through comparison with standard industry forms and best practices.
Submission Format:
Complete entries will consist of three elements, to be submitted online through the ACORD Student Challenge application portal. These must include:
- A presentation slide deck in PowerPoint format, outlining the methodology, procedures, and results
- A recorded video, not to exceed 20 minutes in length, of the contestant(s) walking the judges through the presentation deck
- The actual output files of the project, which may be in XLS, XML, JSON, and/or other relevant formats
Eligibility
The ACORD Student Innovation Challenge is open to college and university students with a vision to improve the insurance industry.
Students from anywhere in the United States (except as prohibited by law) are eligible to enter the Challenge. All Challenge participants must be 18 years of age or older, and currently enrolled in an undergraduate or post-graduate program at an accredited college or university.
Students are welcome to collaborate on the Challenge -- entries may be submitted by individuals, or by teams of up to six students.
There is no fee to apply for the ACORD Student Challenge.
Application Deadline and Instructions
- ACORD will begin accepting applications for the 2025 ACORD Student Challenge on August 21st, 2025.
- To enter the Challenge, please use the registration link at www.acord.org/StudentChallenge to submit your application. This is the sole permissible means to apply for the Challenge. Registration is due by October 1st, 2025.
- Final presentations must be submitted on or before November 1st, 2025. Required elements will include a slide deck, a recorded video presentation (up to 20 minutes in length), and project output files.
- Winners and runners-up will be announced on or before December 12th, 2025.
- All decisions of ACORD staff and judges are final.
Judging Criteria
ACORD Student Challenge presentations in each round will be judged based on the following four criteria:
- Suitability: How useful is the output for a hypothetical pet insurer?
- Completeness: Is all the data useful for the pet insurance process? Are there any major gaps?
- Process: What was the process that each presenter used? How did they use AI, LLMs, and prompts?
- Quality of Articulation: How well did the presenter convey his or her vision?
Winners and Prizes
The winning entry of the Student Challenge will receive the Winner’s Prize Package. Two runner-up entries will receive the Runner-Up Prize Package.