2021 — A Year in Review For Open Insurance
HAPPY 2022!
2021 was an immensely successful year for the Open Insurance Think Tank, and we are incredibly grateful for you and everyone who contributed, whether by joining discussions, writing studies, participating in the wider open insurance ecosystem, or evangelizing open insurance to your own organizations and partners.
Few realize that building a community is a lot about putting together a tightly knit group of doers. Motivation is an understatement, it is indeed the single most important trait in individuals looking, as is the case with OPIN, to cause a paradigm shift. Each and every one of those individuals is an innovator in his own right with publicly visible proof of innovating.
OPIN is a community of makers stretching the boundaries of what is possible and paradoxically at the same time, crushing the boundaries that exist between different ecosystems.
The world of business is quickly evolving not least by the popularity of open source and publicly accessible software and resources. From the outset, the Open Insurance Initiative was designed as an industry led initiative where all output is driven and produced by its community.
Thus, it has been encouraging to find others in adjacent ecosystems have also been successfully innovating along a similar trajectory. OPIN’s partnership with the leading automotive alliance COVESA, has been a defining milestone for the global open insurance community in 2021.
The task was to elevate the daunting work of designing a data standard into an approach that weaves innovation, learning by doing and the collaborative outpour of ideas into a single productive exercise. Personally speaking, the outcome of this project has been enormously rewarding. After almost eight months and countless weekly meetings, we were able to generate and discuss a large number of use cases and produce a data standard that fully supports the Vehicle Sensor Specification (VSS). The most widely adopted standard by vehicle OEMs.
I was eagerly happy to share some of the ideas generated and my perspectives of the opportunities and challenges that connected mobility can present to open insurers in an article titled NEO-INSURANCE IN THE AGE OF CONNECTED MOBILITY.
In order to demonstrate the viability of the project, the working group has produced several documents including POC guidance and artifacts to invite wider participation by insurers, OEMs, cloud service providers and other stakeholders in progressing POCs and MVPs.
Three publicly accessible documents were published under a creative commons licence:
- OPIN Enabled Mobility Use Cases
- Motor Insurance technical POC and Implementation
- Data Catalogue — USE CASE DATA
An update to the Motor insurance data model was carried out to add almost 90 new data elements to enable native integration with connected vehicles.
This work has come on the heels of the Open Insurance Blueprint having been published in January and included the first ever version of the OPIN data standard. The latest version, v1.2, has been published and now the data standard covers 8 lines of business.
1- Motor insurance
2- Property insurance
3- Business Interruption insurance
4- Cyber Liability insurance
5- Pet insurance
6- Term Life insurance
7- Travel insurance
8- Credit insurance
The Italy Working Group was formed in May in partnership with the startup accelerator G2 and soon after they kicked off their activities with more than two dozen Italian startups to work on producing a developer playground using OPIN standard as reference implementation. The playground is slated for launch in 2022.
In June we formed the Legal & Regulatory Working Group which counted among its members, practicing insurance lawyers and legal experts from banking and automotive domains. OPIN actively participates in regulatory discussions and consultations and some of our members represent OPIN at important agencies across the world. This has included the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and The Directorate-General for Financial Stability (DG FISMA).
OPIN was also a respondent to The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority’s (EIOPA) consultation on Open Insurance. We have also contributed to a UN/CEFACT whitepaper titled OPEN FINANCE TO SUPPORT TRADE FACILITATION.
OPIN has been producing bespoke studies specifically for its corporate Lab Members. These studies (not publicly available) examine and report on leading edge topics. This has included a study examining the evolving digital user interface in capturing additional value. RETHINKING THE CUSTOMER INTERFACE IS KEY examined how smartphone makers have used the Digital Key 2.0 standard to force -not so keen- automotive players in integrating their software into the infotainment systems.
In our most recent research, we have examined the principles of composability popularized by InsurTech marketplaces. Emerging marketplaces for composable insurance applications provided deep insights on how leading players technically design a framework to serve up a wide range of applications. Insurers are increasingly making use of such marketplaces to orchestrate a complex web of AI powered services.
OPIN has participated in more than 20 online conferences and events during 2021 and it was emboldening to find many of our members willing to present on behalf of OPIN. It has brought me a lot of pleasure to see our contributing members waving the OPIN banner and demonstrating the value of the work that they and others in the community have produced.
Looking ahead, there are several projects under development to expand the ecosystem of partners, take the open innovation labs concept to the next level, introduce new working groups and begin to roll out tools and kits. Various blockchain innovations are of interest to OPIN and there is room for the Smart Contracts & Oracles Lab to launch several projects.
I will conclude this article right where I started. OPIN’s growing community of contributors is what has made much of this work possible. Three years of labour has gone into fostering the ethos of collaborative design and open innovation. With the recent launch of the online OPIN forum, we have introduced a global peer-to-peer environment where developers and experts at many domains can discuss, ask or answer questions relating to OPIN standards, technologies, software, or participate in calls for participation, POCs, MVPs and much more. It will become a rich and open resource for chief architects, developers, data scientists and legal experts.
I am extremely excited for the year ahead. There’s lots of work to do, but it’s work that I am passionate about and eager to see bear fruit.
