The Future of Insurance – John Kellington, CEO, ACORD

Episode Detail

John Kellington has spent his career on every side of the same question: how does data move reliably across an industry built on thousands of separate systems that all need to talk to each other? He's built the standards, lived by them as a carrier CIO, and now, as the new CEO of ACORD, he's back to run the organization that sets them for the entire global insurance industry.

In this conversation, Kellington and Bryan dig into what ACORD actually does beyond its well-known forms library, why AI in insurance can only be as trustworthy as the data underneath it, and how a reference architecture built inside IBM more than 30 years ago is still shaping how the industry should think about modeling risk today, including the messy, high-volume data coming from connected cars and IoT devices that doesn't fit neatly into any existing field.

Guest Bio

John Kellington is the Chief Executive Officer of ACORD (the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development), the insurance industry's global standards-setting body. He returned to ACORD in August 2026 after 16 years as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of The Cincinnati Insurance Company, where he applied an architecture-led model to transform the carrier's technology operations. Kellington began his career at IBM, then spent seven years as a carrier technology leader at Ohio Casualty (later acquired by Liberty Mutual). He previously spent three years at ACORD as Senior Vice President of Standards Development, Information Technology, Corporate Finance and Membership, where he helped develop what is now known as the ACORD Reference Architecture.

This episode was recorded live at ACORD Connect 2026.

Show Notes:

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: