The Linux Foundation and the American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS) have announced openIDL, the Open Insurance Data Link platform and project. The platform will help reduce the cost of regulatory reporting for insurance carriers, provide a standardized data repository for analytics and a connection point for third parties to deliver new applications to members.

openIDL brings together some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including The Hanover and Selective Insurance Group, along with technology and service providers to advance a common distributed ledger platform for sharing information and business processes across the insurance ecosystem.

The first use case for the openIDL network is regulatory reporting in the Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance industry. Initially built with guidance from AAIS, openIDL guarantees to regulators and other insurance industry participants that data is accurate and complete, implemented by a “P&C Reporting Working Group” within the openIDL network.

Insurance sectors beyond P&C are expected to be supported by openIDL in the coming months, and use cases will expand beyond regulatory. A “Flood Working Group” has already been assembled to develop use case catastrophe modeling in support of insurers and regulators. openIDL is also collaborating on joint software development activities, building upon Hyperledger Fabric, Hadoop, Node.js, MongoDB and other open technologies to implement a “harmonized data store,” enabling data privacy and accountable operations.

The combined packaging of this software is called an “openIDL Node,” approved and certified by developers working on this project, and every member of the network will be running that software in order to participate in the openIDL network. Additional joint software development for analytics and reporting are also included in the openIDL Linux Foundation network.