Loss-Run Standard Ready For Test Drive
New Orleans
Proof-of-concept participants for a loss-run standard announced they are pleased with the programs progress and ready to go to the next step.
The program has been successful, they said, in demonstrating potential service enhancements, cost reductions and improved process efficiencies, the programs participants reported at the Risk and Insurance Management Society conference here.
"Were pretty excited about where we got in the proof-of-concept," said Brenda Aylor-White, e-relations director, corporate marketing, for Royal & Sun Alliance in Charlotte, N.C. "Now we need other people who are interested in data standards to get on board."
Royal & Sun Alliance carried the successful data transmission with Marsh, Inc., a unit of Marsh & McLennan & Company in New York City.
RIMS has been working with Pearl River-based ACORD since last year to come up with an XML-based loss-run standard for risk managers, brokers and insurers, said Elizabeth Morrell, vice chair of the technology advisory council for New York-based RIMS.
Ms. Aylor-White explained that her company currently uses a risk management information system to "transmit data to our broker partners, and there are a lot of frictional costs involved in doing that."
An example, she said, is that without standards, the data has to be reformatted before it is sent or after it is received from sources that do not share the same system. The data, she said, is also now sent "on a cartridge, but in the proof-of-concept we send it to a server on the Internet."
All those reformatting programs "take development and programming time," she said, adding to cost.
While their current RMIS is "a good system," she said, "how much better could it be if we could drive down some of that cost?"
She said the main goal of the project was to "test drive this proposed standard and see if it was real. We need depth to make it meaningful for large commercial risk."
Another goal, she said, was to get recommendations to improve the standard by "involving people who really touched this. And we have been able to do that."
The next step at this point is "undetermined," she said. "It depends on where we go with the standard and what our respective organizations decide to do with this."
The project is a non-proprietary industry scenario designed to bring all business partners together, said Ms. Morrell. Parties that need access to loss data include the insurer, broker, risk manager, third-party administrator, bank and reinsurer, she noted.
Whats stopping that is proprietary legacy systems and proprietary data formats, said Ms. Morrell, who is senior risk analyst at Southern Company in Atlanta.
Ms. Aylor-white concluded that: "We want your investment. Im ready for my next partner. If someone else is willing to test drive this, were going to be looking to take this standard proposal to subcommittee in June, have people take a look at it, and hopefully have an approved standard as soon as possible."
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, April 29, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.