Property & Casualty/Surety Working Groups

Agriculture Forms
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-agriculture
Teams email: pcs-agriculture@teams.acord.org
Chair: Donna Barr, Marsh
The purpose of this working group is to revise the agricultural applications so more insurers will accept them versus using company proprietary applications. The group concluded review of the ACORD 401, 402, 403, 404, and 405 forms during the winter/spring development cycle and the updates were approved during the subsequent vote. Ongoing work will begin with a review of the ACORD 410 - Small Farm/Ranch Application.
 See Donna Barr, Marsh, discuss the Agriculture Forms Working Group

Professional Liability Specialty Lines
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-specialty
Teams email: pcs-specialty@teams.acord.org
Chair: Keith Savino, Warwick Resource Group
The purpose of this working group is to organize and/or develop standards surrounding Professional and Specialty lines of business. The group has been active for two development cycles and just concluded the development of the new ACORD form 825 - Professional / Specialty Insurance Application. The group is following the standard commercial lines form model which employs a cover sheet (ACORD 125) that is designed to allow for the subsequent attachment of the line of business forms (property, GL, etc.). The 825 is the specialty lines equivalent of the 125. Ongoing work will involve development of the forms specific to various types of professional and specialty lines (ex. D&O, E&O, etc.).
 See Keith Savino, WRG, discuss the Specialty Lines Working Group

Producer Licensing
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-pla
Teams email: pcs-pla@teams.acord.org
Chair: Robert Hamburger, Chubb Group; Deborah Gregory, Lockton Companies, Inc. 
The purpose of this working group is to document the P&C/Surety producer licensing and appointment process and related data collection and sharing requirements end to end for all jurisdictions. The group will then identify existing ACORD standards that can be utilized as well as gaps that need to be filled. The group began in late February 2006 and agreed to initially focus on the process specific to an agent (person) with a focus on developing a standardized form. 

Residential Forms
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-residential
Teams email: pcs-residential@teams.acord.org
Chair: Brian Bartosh, Top O'Michigan Insurance
This group will work to develop a new version of the 80/84/85 that will be more widely accepted by the industry. This expanded form will also eliminate carrier specific supplements and include broader Forms Instruction Guide text to assist in the training and education of users of the form.

Forms Review
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-formsstanding
Teams email: pcs-formsstanding@teams.acord.org
Chair: Jo Ann Litwin, Litwin, Castle & Christ
This group facilitates the open discussion of the Forms MRs that have been submitted. In addition to the MR reviews, the PCS Forms Standing Working Group will review pending regulatory changes rooted in Forms development or related enhancements (ex. ACORD logo, copyright).  This group helps facilitate communications and implementations of the pending and/or completed changes to the forms.  

Surety
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-surety
Teams email: pcs-surety@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Mike Dulz, Travelers
The Surety Working Group has been active for several years developing the Surety section of the ACORD P&C/Surety XML Business Message Standard. With the development of the V2 standard, the Surety WG will focus on ongoing implementation growth and, where needed, provide documentation to assist implementers. They will also monitor and participate in the V2 efforts with respect to Surety.

PCS Version 2.0
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcs-v2
Teams email: pcs-v2@teams.acord.org
Chairs: N/A
This working group is developing the new PCS XML V2 Standard. The group initially documented the business and architectural requirements and then began transforming the V1.x business content into the new design. The work is being done in a three phase project plan. Phase 1 was delivered at the end of 2005. Phase 2 is scheduled to conclude mid-2006. Phase 3 is scheduled to conclude by year-end 2006.

MR Review
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/pcsmr-review
Teams email: pcsmr-review@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Donna Gilbert, Applied Systems
This working group will provide a forum for the ongoing review of maintenance request submissions coming from the members and standards participants and to provide recommendations and guidance on how to best address expressed business, technical, and implementation requirements.

Ocean Marine/Cargo
This group is running jointly between the RLC and PCS Programs. Please see Joint Working Groups

For complete information on working groups, please visit http://www.acord.org/Standards/workinggroups.aspx

Underwriting Requirements Invoicing
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/uwrequirements
Teams email: uwrequirements@teams.acord.org
Chair: Pat Slutske, AIG
The Underwriting Requirement Working Group has been addressing a previously neglected area of vendor and carrier operations - how services are billed and paid. They have already examined the different processes and sets of data requirements in current use, and extracted and defined the common essence of the process. The impacts to the model have been identified, and activities to flesh out the detail for the maintenance requests and implementation guide are in progress. They are focusing on completing and submitting changes and documentation for Invoicing Transactions and Response Messages as well as completing the Invoice Implementation Guide.  See Pat Slutske, AIG, discuss the Underwriting Requirements Invoicing Working Group

Producer  
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/life-licwg
Teams email: life-licwg@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Michael Bauer, Kaplan Financial; Todd Cohen, EZ-Data
The Licensing and Appointments working group has thus far identified, defined, and completed Licensing, Appointing, Administrative, Commission, and Hierarchy messages. In addition, the group has garnered approval of the Commissions Guide and has nearly completed the final draft of the Producer Hierarchy and Teams Guide. The objective of this working group is to complete the circle, by validating the existing elements/messages and providing implementation support to partners who are currently planning implementations. Another objective of this group is to provide support in developing the Commissions Rate Table as determined by the industry participants.

Policy LifeCycle
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/life-plc
Teams email: life-plc@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Pat Slutske, AIG; Pat Graham, Prudential
The core objective of this group is to develop a cohesive, integrated implementation guide describing how to consistently interpret and manage information about policies - proposed (New Business), pending (Issue & Underwriting) and active (Inforce) to support all lines of business (Annuity, Life, Disability/Health) and all distribution channels (captive, brokerage, bank / securities, direct, other). During this effort, if modifications to the Model or Help File (including TXLife) are required to support business requirements or modeling expectations, the appropriate Maintenance Requests will be submitted.
 See Pat Graham, Prudential, discuss the Policy LifeCycle Working Group

Life Reinsurance
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/life-reinsurance
Teams email: life-reinsurance@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Peggy Barusta, Manulife; Simon Bell, LOGIQ3
During the previous cycle, the group finalized the business flows, data sets, and messages along with an implementation guide for the inforce download which uses the current Life & Annuity 551 Transaction to download a list of policies currently being covered from the cedent to the reinsurer. The next steps will focus on the transaction which allows for notification of changes or additions based on the applicable treaty to a book of business from the cedent to the reinsurer.

Life Version 3
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/life-v3/index.php
Teams email: life-v3@teams.acord.org
Chairs: TBD
The objective of this group is to provide an assessment of the current issues with Life V2 and develop a high level plan and approach to move toward a Life V3. The current Life and Annuity standard cannot cleanly support increasing complex business needs. In addition the lack of consistent implementation is resulting in increased cost for future implementations. Some of the concerns to be overcome by the proposed plan for a Life V3 include, current redundancies and ambiguity in the model, varied levels of granularity of messaging, concerns around consumability of the current model. The current Life & Annuity (LA) Standard has and currently remains in a silo from Property & Casualty/Surety (PCS) and Reinsurance and Large Commercial (RLC) Standards. The industry is currently moving toward mixed-products (ex. Long Term Care [LTC] rider on an Annuity) in addition to cross-products (mortgage insurance and a term life). There are also new lines of business such as employee benefits that will be developed which are sold by brokers who traditionally sell PCS Commercial Lines business. V3 will move toward a unified XML Messaging Standard that can be used by all lines of business and is a necessary step for ACORD and its member companies.

Employee Benefits
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/life-empben
Teams email: life-empben@teams.acord.org
Chairs: TBD
The initial focus for this group will be non-medical lines of business like Life, Disability, Dental, Vision and Long Term Care. In scope for these lines of business will include standard information exchange sets for brokers and carriers related to quote enrollment, eligibility, and product profile for quoting. The initial focus would establish points of integration between quote and enrollment process. Once the deliverables has been achieved, specific areas for Health can be considered like census data, plan design, and health risk questionnaires. The deliverables for the initial scope include a standardized information set for point of sale efficiencies for non-medical lines of business and will include - RFI and RFP (to include census data for quote information and eligibility management), Employer Application/Quote process, Enrollment information (enrollment submission, pending case, risk assessment questionnaire, enrollment form).

Business Dictionary
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/businessdata
Teams email: businessdata@teams.acord.org
Chair: Monique Hesseling, ACE 
ACORD Facilitator: Cindy Maike, cmaike@acord.org
This group is focused on creating a global cross domain business dictionary to support the ACORD Standards Framework and to help enhance interoperability in the insurance industry.

 See Cindy Maike discuss the Business Dictionary Working Group

Web Services Profile
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/jtwsp
Teams email: jtwsp@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Jim Brain, Aegon US (Life); Sandi Perillo, The Hartford (PCS); Tom Neff, Aon Re (RLC)
ACORD Facilitators: Phil Brown, pbrown@acord.org ; Serge Cayron, scayron@acord.org
This working group's purpose is to define Web Service Standards implementation guidelines, encompassing the latest developments of these standards and applicable to all ACORD business processes. The group is working on a series of autonomous Web Services Profile components (Basic, Addressing, Security, Reliable Messaging, SOAP Fault, Attachment handling and Batches), to be delivered in phases until end 2007.

Naming and Design Rules (NDR)
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/jtndr
Teams email: jtndr@teams.acord.org
Chair: TBD
ACORD Facilitators: Phil Brown, pbrown@acord.org ; Serge Cayron, scayron@acord.org
This working group has been initiated from the need of developing new ACORD XML components around a single XML architecture that would encompass all ACORD domains. The group will develop a set of XML architecture principles, which will be in line with approaches taken within the wider XML user community. Examples of issues to be addressed are XML naming conventions, standardized data types, code list representation, message assembly principles, use of XML schema features, use of namespaces, and XML extension method. In November 2006, the scope of the working group has been extended to address new requirements in relation to the translation into XML of the Core Components and process service definitions, in support of the concurrent development of the ACORD Standards Framework.

Ocean Marine/Cargo  
Teams Site: http://teams.acord.org/apps/org/workgroup/ocean-marine
Teams email: ocean-marine@teams.acord.org
Chairs: Mitchell Wasserman, Oceanwide; Mike Spaull , Lloyds
Please note: This group is running jointly between the RLC and PCS Programs.
This working group will develop standards for the Ocean Marine/Cargo line of business. Ocean marine/Cargo has relevance to ACORD's PCS and RLC domains. Their respective steering committees recommended a two phase approach to this effort:  Phase 1-Business will be focus on the business processes associated with this line and take into account the potential scope of work that might subsequently ensue with regards to standards development; Phase 2 - Standards Development - would be drafted with the goal being a delivery as a maintenance request for a new standard or enhancement to an existing standard.

For complete information on working groups, please visit http://www.acord.org/Standards/workinggroups.aspx