Proprietary Annuity Standard Donated To Advance Work Of NAVA, ACORD
The National Association for Variable Annuities and ACORD, two nonprofit entities in insurance, are praising the donation by AnnuityNet, Inc. of its proprietary XML standard as "a good starting point" toward development of a universal standard in this area.
"This is a tremendous contribution to the standardization effort [that will allow] straight through processing of annuities electronically," states Deborah Tucker, assistant vice president of communications at Reston, Va.-based NAVA.
"Its a good starting pointtowards creating better service and faster service for customers and reducing costs by adopting standards," says Rick Heil, program manager, life standards, for Pearl River, N.Y.-based ACORD. "Its good news for everyone."
Earlier this month, Leesburg, Va.-based AnnuityNet, a provider of online technology for financial services, announced that it was giving to the industry its formerly proprietary standard for transmitting and exchanging annuity account and transaction information across the Internet.
AnnuityNet said it hoped to support and accelerate efforts by NAVA and others in the industry toward creating a universally adopted industry standard for annuity application data exchange. The company said its technology "enables nearly error-free completion of online applications and full account servicing capabilities," driven by its scalable XML data standard.
XML–extensible markup language–is a set of rules for developing standard codes that computers can use to read and combine information stored in different database formats.
"We developed an XML standard that describes all the data required to package up an annuity electronically, including all the required forms," explains Steve Dunlap, senior vice president, sales and marketing, for AnnuityNet. "All the data is included in this standard. Its complete, so it could be used as a foundation for NAVA and ACORDs efforts."
