Welcome to JargonBuster
Everything you wanted to know about messaging but were too busy to ask!
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| Jargon | Busted |
|---|---|
| Accounting and Settlement (A&S) | Accounting and Settlement (A&S). The A&S project was initiated to drive the development and implementation of electronic documents and messaging for accounting and settlement transactions in the London Market. The standards vehicle chosen by the market to achieve this was ACORD. The relevant ACORD standards are: - ACORD Messaging Service (AMS) standards (for communications of messages). - ACORD Document Repository Interface (DRI) standards (for communication of documents) and Reinsurance and Large Commercial (RLC) XML standards (for communication of Accounting data). The current A&S market initiatives are: - Accounting and Settlement. The delivery of images of the current bureau inputs for both Lloyd‘s and companies markets to the IMR either using ACORD DRI or via direct load. Xchanging then use these images to process the transactions rather than the existing paper inputs. - eBot Electronic Back Office Transactions. The use of the full suite of ACORD messages as defined above for the management of the Accounting and Settlement processes for the non-bureau market. - eAccounting. A new initiative looking to replace the inputs to the Bureau with the full suite of ACORD messages as above which will then be automatically loaded to the current Xchanging systems. |
| ACORD | A global standards body focused on the insurance world that develops and maintains data exchange standards, mainly XML based, for the electronic transaction of insurance and reinsurance business. See www.acord.org |
| ACORD RLC | The ACORD “Reinsurance and Large Commercial” set of XML standards - this is the subset of ACORD standards most relevant to the London Insurance Market. |
| AMS | ACORD Messaging Service (AMS) is an over-arching messaging standard that has to be followed in the exchange of any ACORD message. |
| Asynchronous | Describes a mode of communication when sending a message to a web service. The sender sends a request and then “hangs up” - it is expected that the receiver will send a response message at some point. This can be compared to an e-mail conversation where the sender sends a message and the receiver eventually sends a response e-mail. |
| Contract Certainty | Increased regulation of the UK insurance market has required the insurance industry to make a substantial improvement in the degree of contract certainty by the end of 2006. Contract certainty has been defined as “achieving the complete and final agreement of all terms (including signed lines) between the insured and insurers before the inception of the contract". |
| Cryptographic keys | A value which is used to control a cryptographic process, such as, encryption or authentication. Knowledge of an appropriate key allows correct decryption or validation of a message. |
| DMZ | DeMilitarised Zone - a “semi-secure” area of a network, isolated between 2 firewalls, which is accessible to users from the outside world in a restricted manner. Many companies need to make certain servers within their organization accessible from the outside world (eg an e-mail server or a messaging gateway) but do not wish other servers (such as the accounts server) to be visible at all from the outside world. To achieve this, the “partially accessible”servers are placed in a “demilitarised zone” to which access is strictly controlled. |
| DRI | DRI stands for “Document Repository Interface” and is an ACORD standard for the sending and receiving of (unstructured) documents between insurance companies, brokers, service providers, and provides a common “language” for querying document repositories across multiple companies to find documents relating to a particular policy, claim etc. |
| EDI | Electronic Data Interchange - a widely used standard for the exchange of data between trading parties (using structured “flat files”, ie not XML) - historically all London Market electronic messages have been sent using EDI |
| Fire and Forget | A communications model where the sender of a message transmits it to the receiver without any mechanism to ensure that it has in fact been delivered and/or acted upon by the receiver. Used in the past where the electronic business message is sent in addition to more traditional formats (eg paper, fax) and it is therefore not critical to the business transaction that the electronic message be delivered. It is widely regarded that this model is not suitable for a true “electronic” business model. |
| Firewall | This is a software and/or hardware system that isolates a company‘ s computer network from outsiders to prevent unauthorised access. |
| FSA | The Financial Services Authority - an independent UK non-governmental body with statutory powers under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 - see www.fsa.gov.uk |
| G6 | A loose association between some of the larger Lloyds syndicates (Amlin, Beazley, Catlin, Hiscox, Kiln, Wellington) and some of the larger brokers - created in order to accelerate adoption of electronic trading using ACORD standards. |
| Gateway | A machine or computer programme that deals with the sending and receiving of electronic messages to/from trading partners. |
| HTTP | HTTP stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol” and is the set of rules for exchanging files (text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files) on the World Wide Web. |
| Hub and Spoke | Hub and Spoke is the traditional communications model used in the London insurance market, where almost all electronic processing between parties is transacted by a central bureau - ie Xchanging Insurance Services (XIS). In other words, each broker, cedant or reinsurer sends/receives messages to or from XIS who then route it to the appropriate destination. This model has served London well in the past in its role as a subscription market. However, as the average number of participants on a risk has decreased significantly over the years, the cost overhead of a hub and spoke model is increasingly being called into question. |
| IUA | The International Underwriting Association is a body that represents reinsurance and insurance companies operating in the London insurance market to protect and strengthen their business environment. See www.iua.co.uk |
| LIIBA | The London and International Insurance Brokers Association is a trade body that represents the interests of Lloyd's brokers operating both in the London insurance market as well as other insurance and reinsurance markets worldwide. See www.liiba.co.uk |
| LMA | The Lloyd's Market Association provides representation, information and technical services to underwriting entities in the Lloyd's market - see www.the-lma.com |
| Market Reform Group | The Market Reform Group was established in 2000 by Lloyd‘ s, the LMA, the LMBC and the IUA to define, deliver and administrate necessary reforms in the London Insurance Market. See www.marketreform.co.uk |
| Messaging Hub | In this communications model, as adopted by Lloyd‘ s for the Lloyd's Exchange and by Swift for the Ruschlikon initiative, each party is connected to a central messaging hub by a single spoke via the internet, through which they are able to exchange data with every other similarly connected trading partner. The central hub provides message validation and routing services and little else in the way of functionality, which must be provided at the spoke endpoints by the participants themselves. Trading, logically, remains P2P but the hub significantly reduces the effort, cost and risk associated with true P2P. |
| MRPO | The Market Reform Program Office - see“Market Reform Group” |
| Peer to Peer (P2P) | In this communications model, aka P2P, each party exchanges data with each trading partner directly over the internet with no central Hub or Trading Platform. The G6 proved this model worked with a small group of players but it does not scale well - with 160+ Lloyd's brokers and 130+ underwriting entities in the market, some 10,000+ different connections would have to be established and maintained. |
| Placing / Placement | Placing or placement is the process of negotiating and agreeing insurance cover for a particular risk, up to the point that the insurance policy is “bound”, ie the insuring party is committed to covering the risk. |
| Protocol | The ‘language’ spoken between computers to help them exchange information. More technically, it is a formal description of message formats and the rules that two computers must follow in order to exchange those messages |
| RLC (ACORD) | RLC stands for Reinsurance / Large Commercial and is a set of ACORD standards for the sending and receiving of structured data and attachments relating to the transaction of this type of business. It is primarily used in the London Insurance Market where almost all of the current e-business initiatives are based around these standards. See www.acord.org |
| Schema Validation | XML Schema is a language for describing the structure and constraining the contents of XML documents. In the London Insurance Market, messages sent and received are normally validated against the appropriate ACORD standard schema. |
| Schematron | An interestingly named ISO standard for defining business rules in XML for the validation of XML based electronic messages. It has the advantage of being portable across a vast number of IT platforms and programming languages, and therefore allows changing business rules to be deployed rapidly throughout a community using disparate systems, avoiding the need for extensive programming projects each time the market business rules change. Schematron has been adopted by the London Market as its standard means of distributing ”London specific” rules for e-business. See Schematron and Schematron Benefits |
| SOAP | SOAP is the acronym for “Simple Object Access Protocol”. Simply put, SOAP = XML + HTTP. SOAP sends XML requests to a SOAP server over HTTP and receives the response back in XML. Since HTTP is the de facto mode of communication in Internet and all the web servers recognize and respond to HTTP request, it is an ideal protocol to use to enable integration of various systems. SOAP‘ s use of XML to send/receive message enables any system on any platform to read and process the message, unlike any proprietary format. |
| SSL | The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmission over the Internet, where this is necessary. Cryptographic keys (called “certificates”) are shared beforehand by the sender and receiver of messages and are then used to encrypt and decrypt traffic between these parties. |
| Synchronous | Describes a mode of communication when sending a message to a web service - the sender sends a request and stays“on line” until a request is received; this can be compared to a telephone conversation where the sender calls the receiver and only puts the phone down when the conversation has finished. |
| TCF | ACORD‘ s Testing and Certification Facility (TCF) is a new on-line web service, employing TriSystems Software‘ s Universal Messaging Gateway, that allows companies to test whether their messaging applications can communicate correctly according to the ACORD standards and receive certification when they do. |
| Test Harness | A Test Harness, in the context of electronic messaging, is a software application that allows companies to test whether their messaging applications can communicate correctly according to the agreed standards. A test harness can send and receive a range of test messages covering both correct and erroneous scenarios. |
| Trading Platform | In this communications model, each party uses a central market platform via a web-browser through which they access all of the functionality they require to do business with their trading partners. Think “eBay”. RI3K and eReinsure are trading platforms which will happily co-exist with the Lloyd's Exchange. |
| Web Service | In simplistic terms, a Web Service is a web site intended for use by computer programs instead of by human beings. Typically it is used to exchange trading data between companies, and most often a web service will use SOAP and XML as the “communication language”. |
| XIS | Xchanging Ins-Sure - the primary central bureau providing services to the London Insurance Market. A commercial venture, it was formerly two co-operative bureaux known as the LPC (London Processing Centre) and LPSO (Lloyd's Policy Signing Office) The ownership of XIS is 50% Xchanging, 25% Lloyds and 25% IUA. See www.xchanging.com |
| XML | XML (extensible Markup Language) is a “language” that provides a way to create, maintain and exchange structured documents in plain text that can be rendered in a variety of different ways. XML is emerging as a de facto standard to exchange information over disparate systems. |
