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XML is Helping Insurers Bring Order Out of Babel

Bill Kenealy May 1, 2008

Even in the case of technological standards, it seems there can be too much of a good thing. So it goes with XML, which, a decade following its inception, is now entrenched as the lingua franca of B2B and intra-company communications not just for the insurance industry, but also for the digital universe as a whole.

Insurance technologists, who have always needed to move information around in a way that was standard and convenient, can hardly be faulted for falling hard for the open standard. Indeed, the data-intensive nature of the industry coupled with the ever-widening array of agents, vendors and regulators the typical insurers digitally interacts with, have made communication standards a necessity both internally and externally.

“Standardization was the primary driver for our adoption of XML,” says Peggy Scott, AVP for agency services, Liberty Mutual Agency Markets, a business unit of Boston-based Liberty Mutual Group. “Consistency across various applications reduces cost and time to market. The key driver for Agency Markets’ companies is quality and improving agents’ ease of doing business, allowing them to conduct much of their day-to-day business from within their agency management system. It also affords them the freedom of choice in selecting vendor partners for multi-carrier quoting options.”

Yet, the convergence around XML is hardly the industry’s first attempt at standardization. Many past attempts to standardize failed to gain widespread acceptance, due largely to the rigid, inflexible nature of the standards themselves. Not so with XML, which works across multiple languages and output formats, and is loosely-coupled, permitting insurers to mix and match applications of their choice. Moreover, XML is easily customizable, enabling companies to add information and alter code without affecting processes already in place.

“XML provides a way for companies to read the information easily, as well as add to it,” says Tana Sabatino, president of San Francisco-based Vallue Consulting Inc., who formerly headed up XML development efforts for ACORD, the Pearl River, N.Y.-based insurance association. “What we’ve seen is that instead of XML being phased out, it is being used a base for everything else, such as SOA and Web services. XML as a base language has really held its ground across all industries, not just insurance.”

EASY DOES IT

XML’s ease of use, versatility and ability to overlay sundry computer languages and data standards, makes it a natural choice for insurers, especially those burdened by a tangle of legacy applications. Thus, XML has become the tactical weapon of choice for insurers in their quest to achieve strategic aims such as straight-through processing and service-oriented architecture.

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