Insurance Europe Wants Public Data Shared Across EU

The latest from Insurance Europe who want to see more sharing of databases across the Eurozone.

Difficult to see how the sharing of public datasets could make a previously uninsurable risk suddenly more attractive in terms of underwriting it accurately. For example the traffic volume count in England and Wales is based on automated cameras on main roads and motorways, plus manual counts generally carried out during school holidays, again on major roads. So assessing the risk on a typical bank holiday weekend, on a single track national park road would be impossible, given that no viable data has been recorded.

Sharing EU data on traffic volumes in Bavaria or the Alsace would make zero difference to assessing the risk in the Peak District.

Anyway, here’s the word from Insurance Europe;

Insurance Europe has published its response to a consultation by the European Commission on its draft Implementing Regulation laying down a list of specific high-value datasets and the arrangements for their publication and re-use. Insurance Europe welcomes the initiative as it would ensure that a common EU-wide layer of public sector datasets is easily and freely available for re-use, which could lead to significant benefits for society, the environment and the economy.

In addition to the relevant datasets described in the Annex to the draft Regulation, Insurance Europe invites the Commission to also consider making available more data related to sustainable finance, as well as road safety data and the historic development of safety on public roads.

For insurers, a greater availability of data could lead to improved risk monitoring and assessment, meaning insurance products can be better tailored to each consumer’s risks and needs. Developing new, or more sophisticated, risk models can enable insurers to offer more competitive rates or to offer insurance for risks that were previously uninsurable, due to information gaps that can now be filled by the increased availability of data.

Insurance Europe, therefore, invites the Commission to encourage the re-use of more public sector databases as this will bring concrete societal benefits and help to unleash the hidden potential of the EU data economy.