As many are probably already aware, the US Insurance industry suffered a major blow (not to mention TONS of market cap gone) this week in the filing of charges against a raft of executives for allegations of price fixing and other sundry schemes.  For those who wonder what I am talking about a good summary and financial analysis can be found at Jubak's Journal (http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P97291.asp) on MSN Money. 

So I could gripe about the people or the industry that allowed this sort of thing to go on, but I do think that it comes down to a simple (maybe "simple") act of compliance.  In combing through the financial statements of the offenders in this case, doing a comparison and correlation of booked business, commissions paid and received this could be simply discovered.  Reporting infrastructure could easily be set up to have independant auditors mine for trends and anomalies.

But what about this in an SOA context.  We often think about transaction monitoring at the bit level, like whether messages were signed or whether they had this XML element or not.  But what about at the business level?  One thing that could result here as the investigation and remediation unfolds is the implementation of new levels of visibility into accounting books.  Standards like XBRL will become more important as appendages to financial web services.  Those appendages would then be able to capture trends that could be analyzed for compliance.  I could even see something like WS-AccountingPolicy surfacing for mandating that financially oriented web services adhere to a standard of financial reporting.

Now, more to the point of what insurers will do.  What if this case drastically altered the commission structure?  Someone sent me a mail about this, suggesting that this would cause yet more increase on process and messaging efficiency.  Turning commercial insurance placement into much more like personal insurance...and what is wrong with that?  Wouldn't that level a playing field for those that are smaller and more agile in IT and allow them to write bigger business because they can facilitate data capture and transactability in real time vs. easily corruptible human vehicles?  I tend to hope so.

Bottom line...maybe more regulation needed, but overall, let this be a seminal moment for e-Commerce growth in a very human process intensive business. 

- Josh