Since LIXI started in 2000 we've struggled a bit with the question of just how much guidance LIXI should provide on how to exchange messages (as opposed to defining what the messages should contain, which has always been our primary focus). Our thinking has always been that (a) the "messaging layer" stuff was being sorted out elsewhere so we should stick to our knitting and let the market evolve and settle on the best approaches, and (b) the IT departments of the big lenders will never do what LIXI tells them to anyhow, so why even try. All fair enough I reckon, but we still get recurring requests for LIXI to provide more guidance on how LIXI data should be exchanged - and clearly we'd all be better off if there was one commonly accepted solution.
We do have an "Implementation Guide" but it's several years old now and an attempt earlier this year to look at updating it foundered on the problem of deciding just what LIXI could do that would actually be useful. It remains true that the purely technical question of how messages should be exchanged is outside LIXI's core competence and is almost certainly better defined elsewhere. So in an ideal world it would be great if we could just adopt someone else's fully developed messaging specifications - preferably something tailored to the needs of financial services (i.e. plenty of attention to security, and strong support for exchanging supporting documents as well as XML data).
Given what I just wrote it won't surprise you to hear that I have something in mind. The ACORD standards for insurance in the US are an impressive piece of work covering a huge range of transactions. They are well proven in widespread use and, needless to say, ACORD has addressed many of the same problems that we face. Of particular interest in this context is their, "ACORD Messaging Service XML Specification and SOAP Implementation Guide". This spec is written to be largely content-agnostic - which means it shouldn't matter if the payload is an ACORD message or a LIXI one. So my thinking is that we could do a lot worse than just adopting ACORD messaging as the recommended framework for LIXI messaging. Apart from anything else it could give us a useful level of interoperability with the insurance industry!
I've had some exposure to ACORD lately via some involvement in an initiative to bring the ACORD standards to Australia. Mostly this is of only peripheral interest to LIXI (though I note that we have had recent requests to look at adding support for home and contents insurance to CAL) but the messaging part could be exactly what we need.
If anyone has thoughts or opinions on this I'd love to hear them - so I draw your attention to the "Comments" link below...
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