A: A small town of 5,000 inhabitants on Lake Zurich that serves as a residential area for nearby Zurich, known for low unemployment (2%) and a large IBM research laboratory.
Q: What does this have to with insurance technology?
A: In 2007 the city hosted a meeting of large reinsurers who wanted to leverage an existing network to process reinsurance transactions online.
The existing network is called SWIFT which was founded by a consortium of banks in 1973 to process wire transfers electronically. Since reinsurance companies have active treasuries they are all members of SWIFT to move investment and other monies around.
Swiss Re, Munich Re, SCOR, Aon, Willis, and Benfield have banded together to leverage this infrastructure to process reinsurance transactions – starting with premium accounting instructions. The inititiative decided to adopt the ACORD standards, specifically the Reinsurance and Large Commercial or RLC standard.
Want to learn more? From Swift’s collaboration site, “We aim to build a prototype solving industry efficiency issues by implementing a SWIFT-based hub that takes advantage of automatable Acord standards. In the initial phase of the project, this is a private, on invitation-only website.”
AgencyPort enables broker portals in Europe and our CoverIQ product is now live with Hiscox, one of the largest managing agents at Lloyd’s to normalize bordereaux data from US property coverholders. Everything we do is on the back of ACORD standards and we are knee-deep in a sale which will see us build on top of ACORD’s RLC standard and be our first foray into reinsurance. We will be in London on September 1st and 2nd, let us know if you’d like to discuss our solutions for European (re)insurance.