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Chicago event will give the NASBP and SFAA membership an opportunity to help modernize surety industry forms

  

The NASBP membership has an opportunity to help modernize and streamline many of the industry's forms at the 2015 Surety Forms Working Group/Joint Automation Committee (JAC) Meeting, which will be held September 24-25, 2015, at Applied Systems, Inc. in Chicago.

Bond producer members of NASBP need to urge sureties to adopt the ACORD Surety standards, said Robert Coon, Chairman of the NASBP Automation & Technology Committee and Vice president of Surety at the NASBP Member firm of Scott Insurance in Greensboro, NC.

“It’s important for our membership to participate in this, particularly to help encourage the sureties and the vendors to adopt this technology,” he said.

The meeting will involve two committees. The Surety Forms Working Group consists of NASBP bond producer members, sureties, industry and standards stakeholders and software vendors aiming to provide the industry with ACORD forms similar to those available in the property/casualty industry. The Joint Automation Committee, meanwhile, is comprised of the NASBP's Automation & Technology Committee and SFAA's e-Business Advisory Committee.

The electronic forms won't be new, but Coon said the goal is “modernization”—to further define and adopt the ACORD Surety standards that can accommodate different vendor, agency and surety systems, and allow them to more easily send information back and forth.

“In order to gain some of the efficiencies from the computer world, we need to continue defining the ACORD Surety standards to get away from paper and do more things electronically,” he said.

The focus will not be on bond forms, because there are too many different types and stakeholders to reach consensus on a standard, Coon said. But forms such as contract bond and commercial bond request forms are good candidates because they feature data fields that are common for all users.

“We’re really looking at the underwriting-type information at this point,” he said.

The completion of the eLabeled ACORD 0502: Contract Bond Request Form was announced at NASBP's 2015 Annual Meeting & Expo in April.

"The dream is for someone to enter that data once, maybe tweak it a bit, then pass it on electronically for both bond execution and reporting," said Jenni Waggoner, Bond Manager at the NASBP Member firm of M.J. Schuetz Insurance Services, Inc. in Indianapolis, IN, Vice-Chair of the Automation and Technology Committee, and Leader of the Surety Forms Working Group.

The Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), a global, nonprofit organization serving insurance industries, has placed eLabels behind the Contract Bond Request Form to allow the data to be passed electronically, said Cal Durland, Director of Industry Relations and Leader and Ambassador of the ACORD User Groups Information Exchange. XML standards are in place to transmit the data, which may never go on a form in some cases, instead being part of a data stream sent to a surety to get a quote, for example, she said.

NASBP has a library of forms, but technology available to extract data from the forms doesn't necessarily capture all data consistently on an eForm, Durland said.

But through standardization and automation of such data entry, "we end up letting computers do the work that computers need to be doing, and people have the time to do the relationship building, and any kind of advising," she said.

The next step for the Contract Bond Request Form will be implementing the form as widely as possible and determining how to help vendors integrate the electronic data standard into their systems, Coon said.

“It’s one thing to issue the data standard; it’s another to get it adopted,” he said. The “real driver” in pursuing an ACORD standard is “so that agencies can use a system that talks to all the different agency systems,” regardless of the platform they choose to use, he said.

The next forms up for completion are the revision and eLabeling of the ACORD 501: Report of Execution and the new Commercial Bond Request Form, Coon said. The committees also are looking to incorporate XBRL—eXtensible Business Reporting Language, which is a standard for reporting and exchanging financial information electronically—into the forms group so that financial underwriting forms can be standardized, he said.

If you are interested in joining the Surety Forms Working Group, click here
The group is open to all industry professionals, including vendors and any key stakeholders in our industry. It is not a technical group, but a combination of surety professionals with various ideas and skills to enhance the efficiency of our industry.

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08-26-2015 10:11 AM

Just a follow-up: If you are unable to attend, we would like you to provide any thoughts or goals you would like our group to accomplish. The goals identified so far include:
• Engage the sureties and vendors in the process
• Finalize/Vote on ACORD 501 (Report of Execution) for submission to ACORD
• Draft/Review ACORD 503 (Commercial Surety Bond Request Form)
• Identify the next form(s) to be done.
• Identify XBRL integration into the forms.
• Discuss introduction of the FORMS to agents – let’s get them in the hands of the agents so they start getting use to look/feel.
• Introduction of the technology and timeline for deployment to sureties & vendors. (Developer’s Tool Kit available?)
• Identify any hurdles to implementation.
Thanks. We need your participation.