How Does XML Impact Insurance Standards?
For companies in the insurance and financial services industries, the potential impact of XML is enormous. With XML, every participant in the value chain-agents, insurance companies, brokers, and underwriters-can streamline their paper-intensive processes and standardize the way in which they interact and exchange information. For example, insurance underwriting requires multiple document exchanges among many parties, and many decision points at which coverage can be approved or declined. XML is a critical technology for standardizing and automating such information exchange processes.

Meanwhile, industry standards groups such as ACORD are moving to the forefront in establishing XML-based standards for the industry. For example, the organization is establishing standards and data object models for the exchange of information in areas such as policies and submissions, claims, surety and accounting data.

Challenges to Implementing the ACORD Model
The insurance standards lead to a wealth of benefits to the participants in the space, but you'll need to answer a number of challenges in order to benefit. You'll need to:

· Map data from your system to the standard messages that you choose.

· Handle peculiarities in the standards, such as permutations.

· Also support proprietary messaging for non-standardized trading partners.

· Provide the ability to switch between standards if necessary.

· Maintain your mappings as the working groups update the standards.

· Maintain different standards for different trading partners.

· Provide a messaging system that supports scheduling and data transport.

· Handle errors and failed messages.

· Handle system & audit logging.

· Implement a user-interface for non-developer support of these systems.