ACORD, the insurance industry’s standards organisation, has launched the latest enhancements of ACORD Forms built on top of IBM’s open standards based technology. The new ACORD eForms+ will help drive greater efficiency and productivity for carriers, solution providers, brokers and agents, members who utilise electronic forms daily.
Under a new agreement, IBM and ACORD are enhancing the library of ACORD forms to generate XML data, based on IBM Workplace Forms. In addition, the forms themselves have new capabilities and will improve efficiency across the value chain from agents and brokers to insurers and reinsurers.
Agents who are part of the ACORD Advantage program will receive the new eForms+ as part of their annual membership and see new functionality including split fields, related forms listings giving immediate access to any forms related to the original, and overflow capabilities.
Like their predecessors, the new forms can be filled out online, faxed, emailed, and printed and will contain embedded Forms Instructions Guides. Existing static and fillable forms will remain available as well. The ACORD Forms Viewer that participants are familiar with will work with these newly enhanced eForms+.
“This next generation of ACORD forms is a great step forward,” says Ron Dudley, the vice president of Forms at ACORD. “We’ve witnessed the evolution of standardized forms from paper to electronic to fillable and now to these new, technically advanced IBM versions that utilise XML standards to help insurers and their agents process business transactions faster, more efficiently and at lower cost. IBM has raised the bar and taken the lead on ACORD forms technology. We look forward to other solution provider members making available their work that’s already underway and implementing similarly advanced technologies.”