On Aug. 16, at the 2021 Summer National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) National Meeting, AAIS VP of Government Affairs, Legal & Compliance, Robin Westcott, presented the results of a Proof of Concept (POC) testing whether openIDL could support a COVID-19 Business Interruption Data call issued by the NAIC.

The meeting served as the kickoff for the openIDL Regulatory Reporting Steering Committee (RRSC). Ms. Westcott provided highlights from the positive findings set out in the report published by AAIS declaring that blockchain/distributed ledger technology had passed the test enroute to even broader applications across the industry.

Following is a summary of Ms. Westcott’s presentation:

“openIDL, the Open Insurance Data Link, was created by AAIS in 2018 in collaboration with regulators, insurance carriers and other insurance industry stakeholders to improve regulatory reporting and provide the foundation for an external data strategy for the insurance ecosystem. In 2021, openIDL was adopted as a Linux Foundation project to broaden its reach and impact” (POC, 2021).

POC Background

Ms. Westcott discussed the importance of openIDL being continued by the Linux Foundation, because “they are the largest open-source software consortium in the world.”  The Linux Foundation will take openIDL beyond its initial application in data reporting to support data sharing across the entire insurance ecosystem.

The purpose of the POC report was to demonstrate that it is possible to gain previously unattainable insights by correlating insurer information with other data sources through openIDL. The POC examined whether openIDL could enable:

1. a data call to be executed with greater efficiency and more timely information
2. private data to be leveraged by regulators, while maintaining the privacy and security of that same data for carriers
3. greater transparency and data integrity throughout the data call process
4. deeper, more meaningful insights from data
5. openIDL’s ability to correlate data from third party sources to carrier-provided data to gain new insights and inform decision making.

Positive Results

According to the report, “Results were positive and provided the evidence and confidence stakeholders need to consider openIDL as integral to the improvement of regulatory reporting and secure data management across the insurance ecosystem” (POC. 2021).

Click here to view the POC Report