|
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
NIPR
AND ACORD SIGN AGREEMENT TO HARMONIZE INSURANCE LICENSING
PROCESSES
New Partnership is a Step Toward a Uniform System for
the Insurance Industry
KANSAS CITY,
Mo. (Nov. 23, 2009) — The National Insurance
Producer Registry (NIPR) and the Association for Cooperative
Operations Research and Development (ACORD) today
announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to harmonize
specific NIPR processes with existing ACORD Messaging Library data
and message definitions in a major move
toward improving the producer licensing and
appointment processes.
NIPR's gateway between the insurance industry
and state insurance regulators supports compliance
activities such as licensing, appointments and state review.
The current gateway messages fully support both request and
response, including error processing for both life and non-life
business.
By working together, ACORD and NIPR plan to
streamline the overall process by mapping approximately nine
proprietary NIPR transactions to the ACORD Messaging Library, a
cross-domain messaging standard.
"The benefit
for the insurance industry will be that producers can create NIPR
transactions out of the same message elements they are using today
to communicate with each other," said Maryellen Waggoner, Executive
Director of NIPR. "This will make it easier to integrate NIPR
messages into their systems, bringing us one step closer to a
uniform system for the industry."
ACORD has automated producer licensing and
appointment processes within its standards for the benefit of
producers, insurers and solutions providers. Working with
NIPR they will now develop standards for the exchange
of information with state insurance regulators as well.
"ACORD's messaging has
always benefited insurance producers and insurance
companies,” said Gregory A. Maciag, president and CEO of ACORD,
“But now state insurance regulators will benefit from the
utilization of these standards already prevalent across
the industry.”
To implement the partnership, ACORD will form a
working group consisting of its members and representatives from the
NIPR. The group will document the use cases related to the
transactions, map the transactions and analyze the implementation of
the messages. In the end, industry participants can implement the
actual ACORD messages in a business environment to streamline the
process.
For more information about the NIPR, visit www.NIPR.com. | 
