RIMS Annual Conference in San Diego highlighted for me the strength of communities in the insurance industry. Our industry is an interactive web of communities. They are completely dependent upon each other to perform their respective functions: managing risk, transferring risk, accepting risk, clearly a partnership to mitigate loss.
This year, the evidence of ACORD's role in the insurance transaction was stronger than ever. As I sat in the certificates session, where 4 risk managers educated their colleagues on certificates of insurance, the discussion centered around ACORD certificates. These forms have been a defacto standard in the industry since the early 1970's.
The following day, ACORD coordinated a breakout session called Advances in Communication: Standardizing Renewal Data. The relationship between risk manager, broker and carrier was represented as the three legs of a stool. If one breaks, the entire insurance transaction falls apart. Karen Beier, Vice President, Risk Management, of Shaklee Corporation, Alexandria Littlejohn, MD, Middle Market Leader USA of Marsh, Inc. and Robert Geier, SVP/COO, Sales And Marketing And Strategic Initiatives, AIG Domestic Brokerage Group, spoke about the collaborative renewal process.
RIMS Quality Control has published a recommended timeline for the processing of renewals which requires a finely tuned handoff process by all of the parties. The group made a strong case for implementation of AORD Standards to make that process of sharing data more efficient and accurate. Beth Grossman is pictured with the Panel above. Here is the RIMS Presentation.
On the same day, Paul Nunn, Head of Exposure Management at Lloyds moderated a session on the impact of poor data quality on hurricane coverage and pricing. He spent the last twenty minutes of the session discussing the ACORD Catastrophe Exposure Working Group and the importance of having a vendor neutral standard that all of the cat modeling companies can rally around.
