The Case for a Universal Insurance API Standard: Why the Industry Needs Its Own RESO

The Problem No One Wants to Talk About

Ask any insurtech developer, independent agent, or digital broker what their biggest technical headache is, and you’ll likely hear a version of the same story: “Every carrier has a completely different API.”

It’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a structural tax on the entire insurance technology ecosystem — one that slows innovation, inflates costs, and ultimately harms the consumer experience. When a technology company wants to integrate with five carriers to offer comparative quoting for commercial auto, workers’ compensation, or general liability, they aren’t building one integration. They’re building five entirely different ones — each with its own field names, data types, validation rules, required inputs, and error-handling conventions.

This is the carrier API fragmentation problem. And until the industry solves it at a systemic level, every insurtech, every agency management system, and every comparison platform will continue re-solving the same problem in isolation.

A Tale Told Before: Real Estate’s RESO Moment

The insurance industry is not the first to face this challenge. Real estate technology went through a nearly identical crisis in the early 2010s.

Real estate listing data in the United States is managed by thousands of local Multiple Listing Services (MLSs). Each had its own database schema, its own field names, and its own API conventions. A PropTech company wanting to display listings across twenty markets had to build twenty separate integrations. Every MLS schema update could break downstream code overnight. Development teams spent enormous fractions of their time on data normalization work that produced no visible value for the end user.

Then came the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO).

RESO developed a universal Data Dictionary — a standardized vocabulary for real estate data fields — and a Web API specification built on modern RESTful principles. The result was transformative. MLSs globally became RESO-certified. Technology vendors that once spent weeks integrating a single market could onboard new markets in days. Companies reported faster integrations, lower costs, and the freedom to direct engineering talent toward actual product innovation rather than ETL plumbing.

The adoption math was compelling too: when the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) analyzed RESO’s Data Dictionary, they found that 80% of what they were doing locally already matched the RESO standard. The incremental cost of full adoption was small; the benefit was enormous.

The insurance industry has been watching this story unfold in real estate for over a decade. It’s time to internalize the lesson.

The Insurance Fragmentation Problem, Up Close

Every line of business in insurance — personal auto, homeowners, commercial general liability, workers’ compensation, professional liability, life, health — has a unique set of data inputs required to generate a quote. That’s understandable. Rating algorithms differ. Risk factors differ. Regulatory environments differ by state and line.

But here’s the critical distinction that gets lost in the conversation: the uniqueness of insurance underwriting does not require uniqueness of API architecture.

Yet today, that’s exactly what we have. Consider what a commercial lines technology platform must navigate:

• Carrier A uses a REST API with a flat JSON structure, requiring a naics_code field as a string.
• Carrier B uses a SOAP-based XML API, with IndustryClassCode nested three levels deep.
• Carrier C has a REST API but uses its own proprietary classification system, requiring a mapping table maintained separately.
• Carrier D requires all fields in a single monolithic payload upfront.
• Carrier E uses a multi-step stateful session with a token exchange on each step.

None of these carriers are doing anything unreasonable in isolation. Each made independent decisions that made sense for their internal systems at the time. But the collective result is a landscape where integration work dominates technology budgets and where smaller carriers — those without the developer resources to build polished API ecosystems — become effectively invisible to distribution platforms simply because the cost of integration isn’t justified.

This is how fragmentation quietly concentrates market power.

ACORD: The Existing Standard Nobody Fully Uses

To be fair, the insurance industry is not starting from zero. ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) has been the recognized global standards-setting body for insurance data exchange since 1970. It has produced standardized forms, data dictionaries, XML schemas, and — more recently — next-generation digital standards for RESTful APIs and microservices.

ACORD’s standards cover the core areas that matter: property & casualty, life & annuities, reinsurance, and employee benefits. Its Next-Generation Digital Standards (NGDS), launched in 2020 and significantly updated with an Object Model release in August 2025, are specifically designed for granular, transaction-centric data exchange across APIs, microservices, and IoT applications.

In theory, ACORD is the RESO of insurance. In practice, adoption tells a different story.

ACORD’s own 2025 Digital Maturity Study found that only 25% of the 210 largest insurance carriers have truly digitalized their value chains. Less digitally mature carriers tend to use ACORD standards only in narrow niches — enough to check a compliance box, not enough to enable genuine interoperability. The standards exist. The wide, consistent adoption does not.

The challenge, as ACORD CEO Bill Pieroni has noted, is one of network effects colliding with institutional parochialism: “Standards have huge network effects associated with them, so the more people that use them, the more valuable they are. However, people and firms and industries are naturally parochial.”

This is precisely the gap the industry needs to close.

Why Line-of-Business Standardization Is the Right Level of Abstraction

Here’s where the insurance industry needs to think more precisely than real estate did, because insurance is structurally more complex.

A RESO-equivalent for insurance can’t be a single monolithic standard — insurance data requirements vary too dramatically across lines of business. You cannot use the same data model for personal auto quoting (driver records, vehicle VINs, garaging addresses) and workers’ compensation quoting (payroll by class code, experience modification rates, job site locations) and professional liability quoting (claims history, revenue by service type, retroactive dates).

The right architecture is a tiered standards model:

Layer 1: Universal Core Standard Common elements that apply across every line of business and every transaction type — entity identifiers, contact information, address formats, date conventions, policy period structures, and error/response codes. Every carrier API, regardless of line, speaks this layer the same way.

Layer 2: Line-of-Business Specific Standards Discrete, purpose-built data dictionaries and API schemas for each major insurance segment: Personal Auto, Homeowners, Commercial Auto, Commercial General Liability, Workers’ Compensation, Professional Liability, Cyber, Life, Health, and so on. Each LoB standard defines the canonical fields, allowed values, and required versus optional inputs for quoting, binding, endorsing, and renewing within that segment.

Layer 3: Carrier Extensions A sanctioned, structured space for carrier-specific fields that genuinely reflect proprietary underwriting factors or products. The key word is “sanctioned” — extensions follow a defined convention so they are predictable to integrate even when unique.

This is not a radical idea. It is essentially what ACORD’s Next-Generation Digital Standards are attempting to build. The gap is not in the standards design — it is in mandated or strongly incentivized adoption across the industry.

The Cost of Inaction

The price of continued fragmentation is not abstract. It shows up in real, measurable ways:

For Insurtechs and MGAs: Each new carrier integration costs an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 in development, testing, and maintenance overhead. For a platform integrating twenty carriers across three lines of business, that’s potentially $1–3 million in integration work before a single policy is written.

For Independent Agents and Brokers: Without standardized data exchange, comparative raters require agents to re-enter the same applicant data into multiple carrier portals — the same problem that ACORD’s Single Entry Multiple Carrier Interface (SEMCI) was meant to solve in the 1980s, and which remains partially unsolved today.

For Carriers: Fragmented APIs mean that carriers with less polished developer ecosystems — often smaller regional carriers with better pricing in specific segments — are systematically underrepresented in digital distribution channels. Standardization is not just a convenience for technology vendors; it is a leveling mechanism that benefits carriers without large IT budgets.

For the Industry’s AI Future: The 2026 Deloitte Insurance Outlook noted that many insurers struggle with “fragmented, messy data sprawl” as the primary obstacle to realizing AI’s value. AI-driven underwriting, real-time pricing, and automated claims processing all depend on clean, consistent, machine-readable data flowing between systems. Every proprietary API schema is a barrier to that future.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not Whether, But When

The real estate industry spent years in the same fragmentation quagmire that insurance sits in today. RESO did not solve every problem — real estate data is still messy in places, and RESO compliance varies in depth — but it transformed a landscape of custom, brittle point-to-point integrations into a functioning ecosystem with genuine network effects.

Insurance has ACORD. It has the Next-Generation Digital Standards. It has the data models, the XML schemas, the RESTful specifications, and the industry body needed to coordinate the transition. What it has lacked is the collective urgency to move from optional standard to operating norm.

That urgency is building. AI ambitions require clean data pipes. Insurtech investment demands faster carrier onboarding. Agent expectations — shaped by the seamless digital experiences in every other industry — are rising. The market is creating the conditions for standardization to become economically necessary rather than merely technically desirable.

The question for carriers, distributors, and technology vendors is no longer whether insurance needs its own RESO moment. It clearly does. The question is whether your organization will help lead that transition — or spend the next decade building bespoke integrations while the industry waits for someone else to go first.