Recipes for products such as Coca-Cola and KFC chicken are famously locked away in vaults to protect their respective companies' most important assets. Insurers are feeling equally protective about their plans to deal with the influx of data from telematics systems that some believe will be a game changer in how personal auto policies are and will be underwritten.

ACORD began the process of studying data standards for telematics in the spring of 2011 in response to a number of insurance carriers—members of ACORD—who were asking about telematics and wanted this topic brought to the table, according to James Bielak, program manager for the property & casualty program at ACORD.

“It was my job to formalize the community into a working group,” he says. “At that point we are under the ACORD governance policy. I got my steering committee to approve the working group and we ramped up in June (of 2011). “The first meetings were focused on brainstorming business requirements and understanding what our members were hoping to get out of such a working group.”

Over time, the working group has had five or six members and some non-members. Because the process of defining the scope and business requirements took a while, Bielak explains some of the carriers have slowed their participation.

“I'm seeking more participation at this point because we are at a critical junction because we are defining XML messages,” says Bielak. “Some folks may think spending an hour talking about business requirements is not the best use of their time, but now we need people to get back to the table. What we define is going to be the standard and if it is not implementable than shame on us. We want as much participation as possible to make sure what we define can be implemented and will be used across the industry.”

Because of the relative newness of telematics, getting carriers to share information is a challenge. Some major carriers have agreed to participate and are eager to hear what the working group is doing. Getting those carriers to chime in with information on their own companies' efforts has been more difficult.

“There's a problem with telematics and being vocal about it,” says Bielak. “This is something we've been wrestling with from the beginning. If you are a third-party service provider or a carrier and you take a position or ask a question about a certain point, you are kind of revealing what your interest in the subject matter is. By doing that, people are afraid they will spill the secret sauce recipe. Because telematics is new and emerging, insurance carriers particularly don't want anybody to have any notion on why they want the data, what data they want, and how they analyze the data. It's black box to the world. The service providers are following the lead of the carriers and aren't volunteering much information at this stage.”

Convincing Others to Participate

Some of the approaches ACORD has taken include trying to convince the working group to send Bielak some examples—even brainstorming examples—and he will work the data to create anonymity to present to the working group as an example.

“I finally got three contributors who shared with me the structure of the data they are currently receiving nor sending,” he says. “That gave us some framework of reality within which to work. That is what we are using to initiate this XML design. At the same time, we are still struggling to get more participation.”

The chair of the working group, Mark Woods from Allstate, suggested on a recent call that if participants have questions or want to guide the discussion but are unwilling to speak on the call they should email Bielak and he will try to lead an anonymous discussion so nobody is going to be accused of spilling their company's secrets.

“One member actually had their general counsel talking to our general counsel about what we are up to because there were concerns that if their people are going to participate on the standard and antitrust that ACORD is trying to avoid,” he says. “I was never privy to those discussions, but that's how serious insurance companies see this. It is top secret right now.”

Top Secret Challenge

There are many different ways of representing the data and Bielak believes the examples that were contributed certainly reveal that. Bielak comes from a scientific background—oil and mining—and has dealt with big data in those industries and seen standard ways of representing big data files.

“Seismic surveys have a specific format and it allows the data to be portable from one system to another,” he says. “I don't see why telematics data should be any different. I think that past experience gives me an eye to focus on just the data. I do think we are on to some good approaches that de-couple the whole issue of proprietary information from the data itself. By being smart and coming up with a good definition for the data, it ought to provide flexibility to allow different providers to send different types of data to consumers. I think we have the bases fairly well covered right now for a prototype.”

Special Reports /

Setting Telematics Data Standards Proves Challenging for ACORD Working Group

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