Having unambiguous data standards in the insurance industry is a win for brokers and clients alike, according to the president and CEO of the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO), Catherine Smola.
“When standards are followed it gives brokers, insurers and vendors the opportunity to utilize data more efficiently,” Smola said.
“This also opens up opportunities for brokers to have more time for meaningful conversations with clients. Brokers want to clearly identify documents and have data readily available in their broker management systems for client discussion “
During a conversation with Insurance Business, Smola spoke about the launch of the Standards Governance Advisory Council and how it is gearing up to refine data standards in the industry. They also revealed how collaboration is the key to updating the standards and implementation guides.
While they have the ability to make client interactions more efficient, data standards have benefits for those who are implementing these measures.
The first being that a business or organization can structure its data and maintain high data quality for decision makings.
The most utilized set of data standardization across the P&C industry is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which is a computer-to-computer exchange of information in a standard electronic format between business partners, specifically between brokers and insurers.
“EDI has been around for many decades, and, used for personal lines auto and home, and are well embedded in the industry, so they're very mature, they're very robust,” Smola said.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is seen as the next generation from the EDI model, which is “a programming language commonly used by data exchange services to send information between otherwise incompatible systems,” Smola said.
“It defines a set of rules for encoding documents and information in a format that is both human readable and machine readable.”
Lastly, there has been a recent data standard development in the form of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which provides focused data for faster transmissions and processing.
“JSON simplifies the use of web services and application programming interfaces (APIs) which leads to improved broker, insurer and vendor connectivity, and industry innovation,” Smola said.
As JSON continues to be adopted by insurance companies and brokerages across the nation, there needs be clear and concise standards in order for industry-wide adoption.
As an organization, CSIO’s mandate has evolved to ensure consistent interpretation of the property & casualty (P&C) insurance industry’s data standards by insurance companies and technology vendors.
This has coincided with the formation of the Standards Governance Advisory Council, with the goal of creating a “detailed standards adoption framework, including an adoption classification system, to ensure there’s a consistent interpretation of the standards,” Smola said.
CSIO will also continue to offer and update certification programs to ensure that members who are programming the organization’s data standards are doing so based on the implementation guides.
“We want to govern the standards to avoid any conflicting interpretations and also fill in any standardization gaps and recommend any steps on how to close them,” Smola said.
“What we are most keen on is building a sense of confidence and trust that members who have received certification have fulfilled all the necessary implementation requirements.”
As an industry voice on certification and standards, it is important that CSIO collaborates with those businesses that are using its guidelines to maximize efficacy and useability.
“It's important that the industry is speaking the same language,” Smola said.
“We're actually working on this classification system by having formed this governance council of our member organizations, so that they have a voice at the table, because they're the ones that are going to have to conform to the classification system. So it's important that we hear their voice as we administer the classification system.”
The ability for these standards to streamline processes throughout the P&C industry is vast, as the insurer members that are part of CSIO’s Standards Governance Advisory Council represent a large percentage of the DWP that is written in Canada.
“It's one thing for us to develop a framework assessment, academically, but then we have to get their input on the practicality of implementing it,” Smola said.
