ACORD CEO Pieroni on the Industry’s Digital Transformation

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Bill Pieroni, CEO of ACORD, is on a mission — not to “push” the industry toward digital transformation but rather to marshal its inherent strengths and enable carriers, agents and brokers to implement standards and digital best practices to their best advantage. As he likes to say, the role of ACORD, an insurance industry global data standards and services organization, is to “complement and extend” its members’ digital efforts as efficiently as possible.

Pieroni, who was elected CEO in March, is no industry outsider having served as general manager of IBM’s insurance business, as a consultant with Accenture and McKinsey & Co., a senior vice president at State Farm and most recently as global chief operating officer of Marsh. He brings an acute understanding of and deep respect for the industry and its time-honored practices and operating principles. He also brings an outsider mindset in that he recognizes the technological upheaval taking place outside the industry, what’s at stake within the industry, and he’s unafraid to challenge even established norms when necessary.

“We look backwards, pricing our products before we know what they will cost,” he told Insurance Journal. “That doesn’t cut it anymore. We need to change the way we change.”

That doesn’t mean ACORD will change everything.

“We will continue to do what we have always done in terms of working with the industry on forms,” he said. “Our goal now is to add a critical new task — that of reducing the cost, risk and timeframe of implementing standards.”

Pieroni is a big believer in the market’s strength and doesn’t want ACORD’s records role to dictate how the industry operates. But he admits, “there does exist a gap in how these standards are interpreted and we want to apply more rigor in the implementation.”

He wants his organization to become more opportunistic in the sense that it will facilitate the direction the market dictates. “As a member-owned and nonprofit institution, we also hope to develop a portfolio of software assets that are cost-neutral that add to what our various stakeholders are doing.”

Looking ahead, Pieroni said ACORD plans to conduct more research studies to examine how members can best navigate the digitalization process. ACORD’s recent expansion will help. The organization has added new staffers to find the solutions members want.

At the recent ACORD conference in Boca Raton, Fla., on Nov. 1-3, Pieroni delivered messages to his audience on the need to use “technology to drive value.”

“We are in the era of consumerization and customer expectations are not shaped by us, meaning those of us in the insurance industry,” he said. “Digitalization is the glue that holds us together.”

Pieroni said insurance entities have three options in addressing digital transformation. The first option is to ignore it. “That’s a viable path but the company that takes it should be prepared to either shrink or be absorbed,” he said.

The second option is to concentrate only on what the firm does best.

The third option is to reinvent the organization.

“Our role at ACORD is not to push anyone to do anything they don’t want to,” he said. “Our goal is to make things cheap, easy and short.”

Pieroni recognizes the difficulties for any insurance entity to change its culture in order to adapt to a digital economy, which is also changing rapidly. The key is that every company, agent and broker needs to have a strategy going forward and the resources to implement that strategy, he advised. Not having a strategy is the same as ignoring the issue, he added.

“It’s no longer business as usual,” he says. “We are living in an era of new ideas and we should always have a sound rationale for any action we take,” he says. “We need to always ask ourselves, ‘Why are we doing this?'”