Abstract
Insurance contracts, often referred to as ‘policy wordings’, lie at the heart of insurance – a global industry with total premiums exceeding $7 trillion. Typically, these policy wordings are tens of pages in length, often exceeding over one hundred pages, and are currently managed by most insurance companies as monolithic, quasi-static pdf documents.
For commercial insurance contracts, however, there is often a need to customise these wordings to satisfy the needs of individual customers, a process which is currently achieved through the application of ‘endorsements’ (or customer-specific modifications), which are detailed in a separate document known as the ‘schedule’. Therefore, the only way to fully interpret the policy wording is to consult the schedule and engage in a process of information reconciliation.
Using structured authoring approaches with semantic enrichment, the policy wordings could be transformed into dynamic, customisable objects with greater levels of ‘computability’, thereby paving the way towards a more robust, digital future for the insurance industry with greater levels of structured data. This paper concerns the context and initial development of InsurML, an XML markup language that is being designed specifically for the creating computable contracts for commercial insurance. With strong industry commitment and funding from major players, the ambition is to establish InsurML as an industry standard.