One of the Market Reform Group's 2008 objectives is for the market to increase its useage of ACORD data messages, known as standards. ACORD standards are recognised as essential to facilitate electronic transactions at all stages of the business cycle i.e. placing, claims, accounting, settlement. There has been much progress to date, especially in the post-inception processes.
London’s practitioners took the opportunity to present this progress at the recent annual ACORD conference – the statistics are now impressive and certainly focused the attention of many delegates from other markets who could see how London was benefiting from their adoption of ACORD standards.
For example, with a continued reduction in paper transactions, London brokers/underwriters are now exchanging over 75,000 electronic messages per week. Electronic claims files transmitted via a shared market repository have modernised the historic company market CLASS system and introduced a new medium for Lloyd’s. ECF is now used by 98 brokers, all Lloyd’s syndicates and over 30 companies in the market and for the first quarter this year totalled some 28,000 claims transactions.
The market’s shared repository now has some impressive statistics of its own such as 2,800 registered users with an average 840 gaining simultaneous access to a total of over 2.5 million web pages per week. This all serves to demonstrate that London is serious about technology and using it to satisfy its vision and aims.
The benefits of ACORD standards to a company/brokers’ operation include greater accuracy and reliability of data (ie. less re-keying/correction), greater portability throughout an organisation, and reduced operational costs and risk – all good for the business.
ACORD standards are truly international therefore using the recognised world standard makes London open for electronic global trade.
