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.”