Ecosystems and data have always gone together

The latest Voice of Insurance podcast featured the chief executive of ACORD, Bill Pieroni, and AdvantageGo’s global business leader, Ian Summers.

A special episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast brought together two close partners of the AdvantageGo ecosystem, to discuss the value of integrating data, technology and standards, so that the industry can reduce frictional costs and inefficiency, and focus on delivering value.

Data-led underwriting has accelerated the value of integration, as brokers, MGAs, insurers and reinsurers all increasingly rely on the seamless flow and sharing of data through, at faster speeds, and with improving technology, allowing ever greater analysis in the name of better decision-making – something akin to Gospel at AdvantageGo and its partner ecosystem.

“Clearly, data over the last several decades has become even more important,” said Bill Pieroni, CEO of ACORD. “That’s what we’re trying to do, helping the industry use data, integrating the ecosystem and all of the stakeholders.”

On data integration and connectivity across systems, markets and borders, host Mark Geoghegan drew a parallel with a simple corporate gift picked up at the Monte Carlo reinsurance rendezvous – a universal adaptor plug for sockets around the globe.

“You know, that gives an indication of the stickiness of data standards, too,” Pieroni agreed, suggesting this is in essence what ACORD has been trying to do with data standards for decades.

It’s also part of what AdvantageGo is working to achieve, particularly through integrating a range of client and third-party data through its ecosystem, primarily for its Underwriting workbench platform.

“It brings businesses together. It’s not just the standard that helps them come together, but actually it’s a catalyst to change,” said Ian Summers, global business leader, AdvantageGo.

For ACORD, an industry ecosystem has been its guiding vision for decades. Pieroni described its workgroups as “a locus for competitors to cooperate and collaborate”, at the core of which is ACORD’s Ruschlikon initiative, created in 2008.

This convened a group of re/insurers and brokers to agree a common vision for reducing back office costs and streamlining processes, by implementing ACORD’s data standards, together with an agreed set of business processes and rules on a global basis.

Summers, working at global re/insurance broker Aon at the time of Ruschlikon’s launch, sat on Ruschlikon’s overarching steering committee, coordinating the accounting, claims and electronic placing workgroups.

“It’s those standards that form the backbone of the London market standards we have today,” Pieroni said. “As with most things in life, people look today and say, ‘that’s very useful’. Yes, but it took people like Ian, over a decade ago, to come together and make the effort to change an industry that’s hundreds of years old.”

Fierce competition, notably between the biggest reinsurance brokers Aon and Guy Carpenter, meant getting senior figures from rival intermediaries in a room together to agree to collaborate has been easier said than done. Even data can be contentious – witness the market’s rival broker portals and placing platforms.

ACORD Solutions

Through its standards business, Pieroni said ACORD was able to identify solution gaps in the marketplace, essentially market failures, where solutions either did not exist or were prohibitively expensive to set up on a market-wide basis.

He explained “sometimes in life it’s better to be lucky than smart”, associating a healthy slice of good fortune to the timing to ACORD’s solutions arm’s launch, which lacked the drag of legacy technology, just as core industry-wide technology trends in the sector began to take flight – notably software-as-a-service (SaaS) via the cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI).

“Every one of our solutions is AI-based, cloud-native, built on state of the market, leading edge technologies, not because we were so smart – we had nothing. We didn’t have any legacy, and we had no accumulated technical debt, and our solutions are data-centric and owned by the industry,” he said.

His next point had Ian voicing agreement, returning to the plug adaptor metaphor, with respect to bringing various ecosystem partners and their together into something collaborative and better than the sum of its parts.

“I didn’t think this would happen; I thought our members would be the biggest users. No, it’s organisations like AdvantageGo that are saying, ‘Gosh, I can use your electrical adapter and operate in 130 countries worldwide and not think about this. Thank you’,” Pieroni said.

An expanding ecosystem

Summers noted there have been nine new ecosystem partnerships since his last appearance on the podcast, with expectations of two new partners each month, and “about 20 in the pipeline”.

“You can see the passion that comes out from people like Bill at ACORD. That’s what we’ve been hunting out, in terms of best of breed components, and slotting those into the end-to-end vision for the specialty market,” Summers said.

“It’s never plug and play, but we’ve built that infrastructure that allows data of various different data partners to connect very quickly and easily, and we’ve got ACORD Solutions embedded right in the centre of that,” he continued.

“Things like its Transcriber Tool, which helps us move data around from individual applications all around the market. We’re using it primarily at the moment for the Blueprint Two [London market digital transformation] work, but its core and central for data ingestion, for example,” Summers added.

It has taken some time for the ecosystem to gather pace, Summers acknowledged, for example working out the details of contracts and service agreements, but it is now getting into its stride.

“Looking back on it, it was obviously going to take time to go through this process, to get people connected, understand commercial models, because we want to be able to make it so much easier for our clients to adopt,” he said.

Clients can choose between different data sources, according to different applications, classes of business, he explained.

“We’ll have many data sources, because part of the power is combining different data sources,” Summers said. “By class of business, you’ve got three or four in each of the classes we’re doing. In the applications, we probably will stick at three, it might not be the same three forever, but it will be three for each of the areas. Then there are the common bits of infrastructure like ACORD gateways, that you have one, because the whole benefit of that is that you’ve got the same connection.”

Geoghegan asked whether with “animals coming in two-by-two”, is the Ark already full up?

“Absolutely not, we would encourage people to apply to join,” Summers said. “It’s coming from two angles: new clients are coming along and saying: ‘We use this rating tool. We’re wedded to it; we like it. Can you make that fit inside the ecosystem?’ So we get customers bringing in tools to us, and we’re also going out and filling gaps.”

Pieroni emphasised ACORD is a keen supporter of the ecosystem as a means of getting the industry to collaborate on data integration and further increase systems compatibility between ACORD’s members.

“Good competitors compete based on relationships, quality of solutions, balance sheet, brand positioning, not the shape of their electric plug,” he added.