A cartoon I saw circulating here has outraged users complaining that 14 competing sets of standards exist. Ridiculous, they say. Far too many. They agree one standard is enough. The result? A 15th competing standard.

In the insurance business, standards for data encoding are absolutely essential. In a global market, it’s near impossible to understand exposures in, say, residential habitational risks when some are described by number of bedrooms, others by square metres, and still others by footage.

And that’s just the tip of the competing-standards iceberg. We can’t even agree between the UK, North America, and Europe how to write the date down. Yet an Esperanto for insurance data is critical to super-efficient digital communication across platforms, systems, and trading partners.

For Quex, our new exposure management system, Quotech adopted the highly functional Open Exposure Data (OED) from Oasis. It’s the appropriate ‘one standard to rule them all’, because of its versatility. It works well with other proprietary standards developed by everyone from cat modellers to reinsurance heavyweights.

Esperanto failed to surmount a single huge barrier: the affinity, among all but its most evangelical speakers, for their own lingua franca. That same obstacle will no doubt block hyper-efficient insurance data transfer for many years to come, but we are finally moving in the right direction.