Reston, VA, May 9, 2003 – NAVA, the leading trade association for the annuity and variable products industry, announced today the completion of an electronic application for annuities implementation guide. The NAVA New Business Submission for Annuities Implementation Guide (the “Guide”) has been produced to direct and assist development teams in building systems that use new business submission sections of the ACORD XMLife schema (the “Standard”). This guide provides a comprehensive field-by-field definition of all data elements covered in the Standard and the associated type codes. It is intended to serve as a reference document to specify what information an electronic application should have, how the information should be structured and how the Standard can be used in support of different basic contract and rider scenarios. The Guide is available on the NAVA (www.navanet.org) and ACORD (www.acord.org) websites.

“The primary reason for developing an electronic application standard is to combat the numerous errors and ambiguities within applications that lead to needless delays within the policy issuance process,” said Tim Lyons, Vice President, Sales Technology of Nationwide Financial and Co-chair of NAVA’s Technology Committee. “The anticipated expansion of automated annuity order entry systems lent urgency to developing a standardized process for carriers to use in efficiently transmitting application data. Therefore the task in front of the committee led by NAVA and ACORD was to define the basic set of information and business rules necessary to complete and submit a fully formed, complete application for an annuity product, either variable or fixed. The result is a common industry XML-standard for what information should be shared between all trading partners.”

"The Guide is a valuable tool that enables NAVA members to implement industry standards quickly and efficiently" said Valerie Moeller, Manager of EDI Development for AEGON USA Financial Markets Group. "As our industry moves forward with automating order entry for annuities, XML will be the technology of choice due to its flexibility and platform independence."

In late 2001, NAVA entered into an agreement with the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), the leading standards organization for the insurance industry, to work together to develop XML-based standards for the annuity industry. The partnership has NAVA coordinating and developing requirements for annuity standards through the efforts of its Technology Committee. NAVA’s Technology Committee has sponsored several ACORD working groups that have developed critical presale messages that include the Product Profile (PPfA), a Commission Profile (CPfA) and the New Business Submission (NBfA). ACORD ensures that these standards are open standards in the public domain and available to anyone free of charge no matter what their affiliation with ACORD or NAVA.

“We have seen the tremendous benefits like faster time-to-market from the use of the product profile industry standard in the work we have done to-date with our clients on the carrier and distribution sides of the business,” stated Kristina Vaughn, Senior Vice President of Product Development of AnnuityNet, Inc., a leading front-end solutions provider. “XML provides an effective way of organizing data elements to support electronic data exchange between organizations. By definition, it is extensible, meaning additional data can be added to an XML file with minimal effort. It has a self-describing characteristic, which makes it easy to read and parse for programming. Perhaps most importantly, it is based on a stateless protocol (HTTP), thus allowing transmission of data real-time over the Internet to any platform. These are just three of many advantages XML provides as a standard format for NBfA. We look forward to working with the industry in implementing the NBfA as it functions as a return file from the PPfA data stream.”

“This is another major milestone for the annuity industry,” noted Mark Mackey, President and CEO of NAVA. “As part of an effort to implement this ‘industry architecture,’ NAVA’s Technology Committee agreed to several principles in regards to standards development, including open standards to ensure widespread industry adoption, embracing XML to prolong the life of these open standards, and promoting the adoption of these open standards. The acceptance and adoption of these NAVA/ACORD standards will over time have a tremendous impact on our industry.”

NAVA is a non-profit trade association located in suburban Washington D.C. The association provides a variety of services to the industry including educational forums, research, conferences, and lobbying activities aimed at furthering the development of fixed and variable annuities, income annuities and variable life insurance. Founded in 1991, NAVA has a broad-based constituency, with over 350 members representing over 98 percent of the industry. Additional information is available at www.navanet.org. NAVA also maintains and supports an educational website for consumers at www.RetireOnYourTerms.com.