What ACORD Actually Does

• Reach: roughly 30,000 participants worldwide set data exchange standards across the global insurance industry through ACORD, not just forms.
• Still forms, but not only forms: ACORD maintains roughly 800 to 900 active forms, but the bigger job now is electronic data exchange, getting carrier, agency, and vendor systems to talk to each other in the same format.
• Where competition actually lives: exchanging data isn’t a competitive advantage. What a carrier does with that data in underwriting, pricing, and service is where the real competition happens.

Why ACORD Has to Stay Independent

• Owned by the industry: ACORD runs on membership dollars, not venture capital or any single company, which Kellington says is the only reason it can set standards without an agenda.
• “Switzerland”: his own word for ACORD’s role. Not a vendor, not a carrier, not a broker, just an organization funded to make the industry work better.
• The line it won’t cross: if ACORD ever competed directly with the vendors and carriers it serves, he says it would lose the credibility to set standards for the industry.

AI Needs Trust Before It Needs Anything Else

• The core argument: AI can only “flourish” in insurance if it’s built on data that is consistent and traceable, exactly what standards provide.
• “Invent from here”: Kellington’s framing for the industry’s next move. Build on the existing standardized data pipeline rather than reinventing it from scratch.
• AI as the bridge: he sees AI solving the industry’s hardest data problem, the huge volume of freeform text and inconsistent formats that never fit neatly into a standard field.

The ACORD Reference Architecture, Explained

• Where it came from: intellectual property IBM and Prima Solutions donated to ACORD, building on modeling work IBM’s research team did decades earlier. Kellington helped bring that donation in.
• What it is: Kellington calls it the most advanced model of the insurance world in existence, broad enough to represent literally anything that can be insured.
• What it did for one carrier: he personally used it to transform Cincinnati Insurance’s IT organization, driving reuse, lower cost, and higher software quality across the company’s systems.

What the Industry Needs to Do Its Part

• Start with distribution: when agents and brokers voice a need clearly, carriers listen, and when carriers listen, vendors follow.
• Build a community, not just a standard: Kellington wants an “architecture community” of the people who actually work inside these systems, improving the Reference Architecture together rather than leaving it to ACORD alone.
• His near-term goal as CEO: define a clear future state for how the industry’s tools should work together, then map the practical steps to get there.