Catastrophe modeler RMS said it is debuting an open data standard that doesn’t require a license, fees or permissions for usage.

Known as the Risk Data Object, or RDO, the data structure is designed to be given to the insurance and reinsurance industries and will be overseen by a steering committee of industry leaders. Set to be publicly available in January 2020, it is in production on RMS Risk Intelligence, the company’s open platform.

RMS announced the news at Exceedance 2019 in Miami on May 14, 2019, where CEO Karen White framed the new technology as giving the industry something truly new.

“The industry and RMS need a new modern data structure to support high-quality models for new classes of risk and to solve our clients’ longstanding challenges around financial modeling and interoperability,” White said in prepared remarks. “Today we introduced the RDO, enabling a completely open, interoperable and flexible data standard. We are sharing this open data standard with the risk industry so that anyone can adopt it. Our experience tells us that this open and extensible approach is a critical value driver for the market.”

According to RMS, the planned steering committee will guide the growth and development of how users can adapt the Risk Data Object technology, which the company asserts will support a number of analytics, boost efficiency and help cut costs. RMS said that its RDO will support interoperability and create new opportunities for insurers and reinsurers as they build new product in a diverse set of risks. Plans call for steering committee members to enable any user to access the schema code, documentation and tooling that translates between formats.

RMS added the RDO will allow for state-of-the-art modeling for any line of business risks, including traditional property catastrophes. It will also build on top of existing RMS Exposure Data Management (EDM) and Risk Data Model (RDM) technology.

Source: RMS