Trade Without Barriers

To prove that summer months go quicker than any others, it’s already 2 months since the London Market gathered in Lloyd’s to fill in a giant Jigsaw Puzzle while telling us that “data standards are the missing piece” in the market’s modernisation. (I think that was what the point of the puzzle was, anyway…)In slightly odd messaging we were assured that Data Standards would allow “trade without barriers” but the event involved and was co-promoted by ACORD: a standards body who’s standards are behind a paywall something which is literally a barrier. There was also no discussion about whether this meant adoption of a new standard, further mandating or faster adoption of existing standards or what exactly… but still everyone agreed something must be done! (And well, filling in a giant jigsaw puzzle is certainly something.)

I’ve long argued that, insofar as they pertain to Delegated Authority anyway, Common Data Standards are something of a red herring – they are certainly not a panacea. Data Exchange in Delegated Authority is too manual and there’s too much friction, and actually over application of standards in the wrong context can be a source of some of that friction.

Here's a few reasons why:

1. Legacy systems exist at both carriers and MGAs that aren't aligned to each other, or any standards that do exist. These are often systems of record that contain booking data – they aren’t going to disappear overnight. Saying you need to meet a particular standard to play at our table, when to do that requires a multi-year, multi-million transformation project is the definition of a barrier.
   
   
2. Different local standards currently exist (Lloyd's v5.2, Dutch NVGA) that aren't fully aligned to each other. Trying to enforce a standard in the London Market is great, if that’s about how we share data internally with each other – I’m all for an internal standard, and have argued this on many occasions. Externalising that standard creates a barrier.
   
   
3. You can't control or enforce a standard when over 95% of data is shared in an uncontrollable format like a spreadsheet. Try as you might, you cannot control how people use (or spell or misspell) headers, you cannot control specific date or number formats, you cannot control consistency of use of totals or sub-totals (or prevent them). Speak to any bordereaux technician in the market, and they will tell you that even “standard” bordereaux are anything but.
   
   
4. The main London Market DA standard, the Lloyd's v5.2, is a "minimum" standard driven around the tax requirements of Lloyd's with little useful underwriting information - this leads to lots of "flavours" with additional added columns; this is exacerbated by other local regulatory requirements. The majority of the spreadsheets distriBind processes are “v5.2”, and yet they contain vast differences.

I don’t expect this argument to persuade anyone who was at the event – they all have a vested interest in pretending standards are the answer, not a crutch for bad technologists. But if you’ve read this far hopefully you’re open to persuasion.

And if you are, it may interest you to know that distriBind works around those problems to enable our clients to navigate across different data standards, processing over 99% of the spreadsheets loaded into distriBind with no manual intervention or editing beforehand.

We do this by modelling variance; separating input, display and report labels; maintaining transformation and lookup tables; using expressions to modify and generate data, among other things.

This allows us, for example to receive Dutch NVGA and output v5.2 for one client; to automatically calculate retail brokerage for another; and provide aggregated financials for booking into “legacy” systems for others.

This is actually what trade without barriers looks like – powerful and flexible technology that smooths over the differences between business partners without friction.

I don’t have a puzzle for you, but I do have an email if you’d like to get in touch and find out more contact@distribind.io