The Back Office of the Back Office

Ken Tashiro brings a background genuinely uncommon in insurance: raised in Tokyo by a Japanese and German family, educated at a German school through high school before university in Japan and graduate school in the US, with a career that ran through large-cap private equity, investment banking, and a stint in fintech startups before insurance entered the picture at all. Like many people in the industry, he describes essentially stumbling into it — a conversation with ACORD’s current CEO during his startup years convinced him the organization was at the edge of genuinely transformational digitization work, and he joined roughly four years before this recording.

About Ken Tashiro

Ken Tashiro is VP of Corporate Development at ACORD, the global standards-setting organization for the insurance industry, serving a community of more than 36,000 member participants across P&C, life and annuities, and reinsurance.

From Paper Forms to JSON APIs

ACORD was founded in 1970 by large carriers and brokers who recognized a specific, expensive inefficiency: every carrier used a different form, which meant filling out insurance paperwork was needlessly redundant and costly across the industry. ACORD’s original mandate was facilitating the standardization of those forms — paper standards that evolved into XML messaging, and more recently into what Ken calls ACORD’s “next-gen digital standards,” a JSON-based, API-powered standard set available as part of ACORD membership.

The Aon-Zurich Pilot: Fixing Reconciliation, Not Distribution

Ken pointed to a specific, concrete success story as illustrative of how ACORD prefers to build solutions: a production pilot with Aon and Zurich addressing post-bind premium accounting reconciliation — the tedious, largely manual process by which brokers and carriers reconcile discrepancies between their respective general ledgers on policy information, invoicing, and payments. Historically, that reconciliation has meant phone calls and emails between counterparties manually comparing records to find and resolve mismatches. Aon and Zurich leadership raised the problem directly with ACORD a couple of years before this recording; ACORD worked collaboratively with both companies to build the resolution, and the resulting data exchange is now fully live in production. Ken described this as ACORD’s preferred model broadly: identify a real, member-raised pain point, then build the fix collaboratively with the organizations experiencing it, with the explicit goal of eventually getting the whole industry onto the same rails so everyone benefits from the resulting network effects.

He described this kind of work — reconciliation, accounting, payments — as “the back office of the back office”: an area most insurtech startups avoid in favor of more visible problems like distribution or risk assessment, even though the operational drag it creates is real and largely unaddressed. He gave credit to a few startups working specifically in this less glamorous space, including Andrew Wynn’s payments and premium financing company Ascend, and OneInc.

Six Years of the ACORD InsurTech Innovation Challenge

ACORD runs an annual, global InsurTech Innovation Challenge — in its sixth year at the time of this recording, with legs in both New York and London — where insurtechs submit their ideas and pitch in front of a panel of industry experts, competing for prizes and, as Ken put it candidly, genuine bragging rights and promotional exposure. Applications were open at the time of the conversation, alongside ACORD’s broader R&D arm, which produces thought leadership research on digitization, digital customer experience, and value creation across the industry.

Ken was direct about how ACORD typically forms new partnerships: many conversations start as inbound interest, where a company reaches out, a specific problem gets identified together, and the two organizations build a collaborative solution from there — the same pattern that led to the Aon-Zurich reconciliation pilot.

Advice: Daily Rituals, and the Three M’s

For his closing recommendation, Ken pointed to Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, a book he’d read before but returned to during the pandemic — a chronicle of the daily habits of historically creative people (composers, writers, artists), including the specific detail that Beethoven counted out exactly 60 coffee beans for his breakfast coffee each morning. Three patterns stood out to Ken across the book’s subjects: doing the most significant creative work in the morning, taking an undirected walk purely for its own sake (he used the German term Spaziergang), and protecting dedicated time with family and friends at night.

Reflecting on his own pandemic-era routine, living and working from a small Manhattan apartment, Ken described reorganizing his habits around what he calls his own “three M’s”: meditation (twice daily, sometimes four or five times during the pandemic, which he described as both grounding and a genuine performance advantage at work), music (returning to his electric and acoustic guitars — a Yamaha acoustic and a Fujigen electric built in the style of a Gibson Les Paul, custom-built at a Japanese shop where he used to jam monthly with friends), and MMA (a lifelong interest passed down from his boxing- and karate-enthusiast father, which deepened during the pandemic into a source of lessons in humility and work ethic).

Key Takeaways

ACORD’s founding mission in 1970 — standardizing insurance forms to cut redundant cost across carriers — has evolved from paper to XML to JSON-based APIs, but the underlying goal (reducing expense ratio through shared standards) hasn’t changed
The Aon-Zurich reconciliation pilot illustrates ACORD’s preferred model: a member-raised pain point, built collaboratively into a shared solution, now live in production and expanding toward broader industry adoption for full network-effect benefit
Ken flags “the back office of the back office” — accounting, payments, reconciliation — as a genuinely underserved area of insurtech innovation, compared to the more visible attention distribution and risk assessment tend to draw
ACORD’s InsurTech Innovation Challenge, in its sixth year with New York and London legs, gives early-stage insurtechs a structured path to pitch directly to industry experts
Ken’s pandemic-era “three M’s” — meditation, music, and MMA — came directly out of studying historical creative routines in Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals, particularly the recurring patterns of morning-focused creative work and deliberately undirected walks