Open Data Standards (ODS) is a framework for open and transparent data sharing that will assist in addressing interoperability challenges in the insurance market. Implementing model-developer and model-vendor agnostic exposure data and results repositories will assist in creating choice and consistency in risk management applications.

Having one consistent, community-owned data standard across the market has huge benefits, especially when it comes to data transfer between users of multiple models and systems. This will significantly reduce the huge drain on time and resource when it comes to data processing and formatting.

Being open is key to improving efficiency and transparency which will support collaboration, development and adoption.

ODS can be used by anyone. Its completely open and free to access and anyone can contribute to its development.

ODS is governed by a steering committee (SC) made up of attendees from multiple companies within the insurance sector such as insurers, reinsurers, cat model vendors, brokers and technology companies. The SC meets about four times a year and is currently chaired and curated by Oasis LMF.

Its agreed that ODS should not be owned by one particular company or entity for specific commercial gain and is currently only being ‘looked after’ by Oasis LMF. This will likely change in the coming years. ODS is a market initiative which will rely on wide collaboration from the market to develop and progress.

There are many challenges with adopting ODS but the two main and obvious ones are:

1) changing the mindset and practices of a marketplace that has relied on dominant proprietary formats for decades. Altering existing practices can be disruptive and require extra resource which is the biggest hurdle. Inertia will decrease as large users in the market (especially brokers) start to adopt ODS and include this standard as a format during renewals. ODS also needs supporting by regulators.

2) Agreeing the most appropriate and efficient technology for an open standard. It must be flexible, fit for purpose and easily accessible to the wider user base.

The majority of mandatory fields in OED are model specific and so it will be up to the vendor of that model to supply these in their documentation and guidance. However, there are a handful of mandatory fields required to run a basic model in Oasis to produce the ground-up or economic losses.

All required or optional fields can be found in the ‘Open Exposure Data Spec’ doc on the GitHub repository below.

https://github.com/OasisLMF/OpenDataStandards/tree/master/OpenExposureData/Docs

The next steps on the ODS agenda for development are:

1. Develop the Open Data Transformation Framework (ODTF) so the free, open-source data mapping tool is available to transform data from multiple formats to OED and back. This should be available by end of 2023.

2. Expand the OED data schema further to support Marine as the next class of business. The aim is that this will be available by the end of Q1 2024.

3. Investigate and start the development of a claims data standard covering multiple classes, mainly property and cyber in the first instance.

Development of these next steps will be led and driven by specific working groups made up of market participants.

The long-term goal for ODS is that it becomes “the” market standard for catastrophe risk data and significantly improves data transfer across the market.

The aim is that ODS is a complete standard package, not just limited to cat risk data but to encompass multiple standards for messaging, interoperability and contract definition language.

All documentation on ODS and its governance are accessible to anyone on the following GitHub repository.