NIPR and ACORD Team to Harmonize Insurance Licensing Processes

ACORD and the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR) will work together to streamline the producer licensing and appointment processes. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to harmonize specific NIPR processes with existing ACORD Messaging Library data and message definitions.

NIPR's gateway between the insurance industry and state insurance regulators supports compliance activities such as licensing, appointments and state review. The current gateway messages fully support both request and response, including error processing for both life and non-life business.

The companies plan to streamline the process by mapping approximately nine proprietary NIPR transactions to the ACORD Messaging Library, a cross-domain messaging standard.

"The benefit for the insurance industry will be that producers can create NIPR transactions out of the same message elements they are using today to communicate with each other," says Maryellen Waggoner, executive director of NIPR. "This will make it easier to integrate NIPR messages into their systems, bringing us one step closer to a uniform system for the industry."

ACORD has automated producer licensing and appointment processes within its standards for the benefit of producers, insurers and solutions providers. Working with NIPR, they will now develop standards for the exchange of information with state insurance regulators as well.

"ACORD's messaging has always benefited insurance producers and insurance companies," says Gregory Maciag, president and CEO of ACORD, "But now state insurance regulators will benefit from the utilization of these standards already prevalent across the industry."

To implement the partnership, ACORD will form a working group consisting of its members and representatives from the NIPR. The group will document the use cases related to the transactions, map the transactions and analyze the implementation of the messages. In the end, industry participants can implement the actual ACORD messages in a business environment to streamline the process.