CEN paves the way for the digitalisation of the insurance industry

The insurance business is rapidly migrating from paper-based processes to the digitalization and automation of electronic processes. These electronic business processes take place between independent organizations, which leads to a variety of information formats being used. In order to facilitate this information exchange, there is a need for the standardization of the data formats being used.

The European standards developed by CEN/TC 445 ‘Digital information Interchange in the Insurance Industry’ are focused on the information exchange between insurance companies and their customers and market partners, e.g., brokers, portals, service providers, and other insurers.

In November 2020, CEN/TC 445 published the European standard EN 17419-1:2020, which specifies the transfer of electronic documents and aims to:

standardize interfaces for document transfer and confirmation of receipt,
reduce the cost of printing, paper and physical transportation, for document issuers,
reduce the cost of paper handling such as scanning, indexing and archiving, for recipients,
support customer privacy, through a secure transfer, with automated and transparent processes.

As a follow-up to this Standard, CEN/TC 445 recently published CEN/TR 17419-2:2021 'Implementation Specification for EN 17419-1'. This European technical report describes a concrete specification for an implementation of the EN 17419-1 in a microservice architecture, using REST/JSON based on the Open API 3.0 specification.

In addition, it contains a complete API definition for the services implementing the transfer of documents.

In September 2021, CEN/TC 445 started the development of a Technical Specification for the mapping of an insurance premium invoice to the European cross domain invoice standardized in EN 16931-1. The insurance industry will benefit from this standardized mapping to facilitate the processing of premium invoices for private and commercial clients.

In 2022, CEN/TC 445 will continue to work on European Standards that will support the digitalisation of the industry and allow for Open Insurance. One of the many topics that the Committee wishes to tackle through standardization is consumers' right to data portability, enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Art. 20).

To find out more, visit the CEN/TC 445 webpage and its 2021 newsletter.