Have You Taken the Pledge?

An incredibly hardworking committee of NASBP volunteers is the Automation and Technology Committee, which has been tirelessly spearheading initiatives to make transactional data transference in the surety industry more than just a hope and a dream. If you as a surety professional are not familiar with their efforts, you should be. I am sure that individual committee volunteers have felt from time to time much like the Greek mythological figure, Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to an eternity in which an immense boulder is rolled uphill, then only to watch as it tumbles back down again. However, when frustration combines with energy and determination, progress can result, and the Committee is making and continues to make real strides toward the goal of facilitating surety transactional data standardization and transference. But don’t take my word for it; read the article, “Surety Data Standards: Is Manual Data Entry Dead?” in this issue of the Pipeline.

Working together with its counterpart committee at The Surety & Fidelity Association of America, the Automation and Technology Committee has achieved milestones towards this goal: contributing to ACORD and modifying NASBP forms to characterize specific surety data transactions, such as bond requests and reports of execution, informing influential technology vendors about producer technology needs, encouraging industry-wide adoption of common standards, and working as a member of the XBRL Surety Working Group to describe and tag surety financial data, among other actions. The Committee has even created a way for vendors and for surety agencies and companies to indicate their support of this goal by means of signing a Surety Data Standards Pledge. This Pledge is so that surety firms can readily show that they agree with the goal of using surety and financial data standards to improve efficiency and to enable automated data collection in the underwriting process. The benefits of achieving the goal are substantial:

To access information about the Pledge, including current Pledge signers, interested parties can go to http://suretyautomation.org/surety_data_standards/surety-data-standards-pledge/.This site also includes information on how you too can sign the Surety Data Standards Pledge to show your firm’s support.

Much education remains to be done, so the Automaton and Technology Committee is planning a number of future initiatives, including a survey to bond agencies for the purpose of quantifying the time spent on different processing tasks and a complimentary NASBP Virtual Seminar expressly for bond processors about all of the activities and developments that are being completed to facilitate more efficient surety transactions.

What the Automation and Technology Committee has undertaken is impressive; what they are accomplishing more so. These dedicated volunteers deserve your attention and support. If you wish to thank them for what they are doing on your behalf, take the Pledge and list your organization. I am sure they will agree that there is no better way to indicate your support!