Substance over form

Rough Notes, Sep 2000 by Ketcham, Christopher

Will the industry embrace this solution to the once and done dilemma?

Once and done. When we see the acronym SEMCI, once and done is what we envision-- the ability for an agent to enter information once into a system. have it travel to one or more insurers or elsewhere. and return to the agent ready to be converted into a policy and commissions. With the Internet, the customer can now be part of this loop of information.

Unfortunately, proprietary winds have blown away most attempts at a true once and done objective. Companies have used the power and ease of the Internet to move their proprietary terminals that still dot agent offices to proprietary Web forms that agents must complete online and then again on their agency management system. Each automation system has its own favorite brand of SEMCI methodology fracturing the universality that the industry has been looking for since the time DOS was the dominant operating system for agent computers.

While many companies accept ACORD applications, they still want their own brand. It is more convenient for a company to receive an application in a form that is familiar to the underwriter. A company-specific form may contain identical information to the ACORD application; but because of tradition, the way production screens are laid out or for the purpose of differentiation, the application looks different. ACORD lorms are designed to provide information necessary for a company to issue au insurance policy. and by themselves they do not contain a lot of the specific underwriting questions necessary to price the risk. Companies have and will always need some supplementary information.

Individuality, automation wars and the industry's reluctance to let gio of paper add cost to an already intensely bureaucratic system. Cost comes in two forms. First, because work must be duplicated, more staff is needed. Commissioned agents cannot charge more for their services so their increased costs come directly from profit. Second, errors inevitably occur when the same work is done more than once. The potential for omissions is magnified when information must be transferred from a familiar application to one that is not so familiar. Fixing errors costs money; omissions cause lawsuits.

Yet underneath it all, the only important thing to the ultimate customer is the data-the information the agent works to secure, and the company to analyze. ACORD and others have built standards for the data contained in each of the fields on an ACORD application. In fact, neither the agent's automation system nor the company system needs the traditional looking ACORD form to operate correctly. As long as the data is mapped correctly, it doesn't matter whether your system uses "Insured Name" or "Customer Name" above the input box.

The fact that data is data is the basic idea behind ITM Associates, Inc.'s, ACORD implementation of PDF inFusion. inFusion is an ITM-developed product that converts Internet PDF forms into editable WYSIWYG documents. PDF is an Internet standard developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., and is displayed by an Acrobat reader that is freely distributed by Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/ products/acrobat/readstep.html. PDF forms generally look on the screen exactly like the document that will be printed.

One ITM customer, Aon, has been using PDF inFusion for its alternative markets e-commerce projects. Chris Vitacek, e-business project manager, explained that PDF inFusion has been used to generate online applications that customers could print out and complete and fax to AON, or complete and submit entirely online. Aon likes the flexibility and the ease of installation of PDF inFusion.

ITM has proposed a number of solutions to industry logjams with an enhanced version of inFusion they call The ACORD Implementation of PDF inFusion. With this new product, inFusion can present to the agent a generic ACORD form and send information to the company for display in a format with which the underwriter, rater or coder is familiar, i.e., the normal desktop. If there are supplemental questions, the inFusion product provides the agent with a company-specific supplemental application and sends the same to the underwriter. Many of these things can be accomplished with existing technology but require considerable insurer and agent cost and complexity. All of these processes are performed on the fly by ITM, a company using open standards, that isn't owned by, tied to, or beholden to an automation vendor, an insurer, an association or a standards organization.

Ian Altman, president of ITM, says that the full implementation for the ACORD implementation of PDF inFusion is expected before the end of 2000. Altman says that the initial launch will include the availability of all ACORD applications in inFused PDF format and the methodologies both for carriers and automation systems to communicate with the ITM process.

How does this all work and what can it mean to a company, an agent or an automation vendor? The concept is simple. ITM has built a piece of Internet-based middleware using Lotus Domino Servers. This server technology resides at an ITM facility. It is not necessary for the agent, the insurer or the automation vendor to purchase hardware to make the process work. All the agent needs is a browser. Using ACORD XML and other Web-based standards, the companies tell ITM what ACORD forms, supplemental forms and the other types of data they need. Perhaps companies want the data sent via XML, or faxed or attached to an e-mail; Altman says that ITM will be able to oblige.