CLIEDIS (Canadian Life Insurance EDI Standards) is holding a series of webinars to inform the insurance industry about new technology that will help improve business processes and standards.

CLIEDIS says although the new technology standards, known as Application Programming Interface (API), have been around since the 1980s, they’re not very well known in the industry itself.

In a news release, Tana Sabatino, CLIEDIS implementation services specialist and Darlys Corbitt, CLIEDIS executive director, explain APIs as the same kind of technology used in ATMs around the world. Now, however, they have garnered new interest because they enable web and mobile applications.  

APIs provide confidence

“When we apply this technology to the insurance industry we can think of it in similar terms,” Sabatino and Corbitt said. “You want to use the systems you have already invested in. You don’t want to have to go to each and every company’s website to get at the information you need or to perform common functions….You want to be confident that regardless of what carrier you are sending the request to that it will work the same.”

The two defined APIs as a software-to-software interface, not a user interface, that provides behind-the-scenes, real-time connectivity and which allows applications to talk to each other without user intervention.

“With APIs, you can use the systems you want and access the data and functions you need. That is the reason APIs are important.”

The first of a multi-part webinar series on APIs with CLIEDIS begins August 15^th.