Have you ever heard someone say that industry standards are expensive? How can that be? What do they mean? Do they really understand?
Take it from me and thousands of others who have adopted industry standards and they all will tell you that it is expensive NOT to adopt industry standards. The cost of proprietary interfaces is very costly although these direct and indirect costs are buried throughout the organization. In reality, standards are a very small part of development projects. Remember, standards are used by all kinds of systems that serve different parts of the business. Those systems are expensive... not the standards.
I admit that adopting industry standards requires you to reach out to ACORD, learn about the standard and use it properly. Yes... this takes more time and effort than doing as you please in a proprietary way. But the benefits of compliance far outweigh this incremental effort.
Some vendors that sell non-complaint solutions may advise their clients that adopting standards is prohibitive for them. This could be true because they are sitting on legacy technology or looking for the ROI on their capital investment. But my answer to them is to migrate those products over time to include the standards. All respectable vendors have the est interest of their customers in mind... and let's face it... as well as their own. So they need to find the balance between holding onto the past and planning for the future.