Standard for Environment, Risk and Insurance (SERI)

SERI (Standard for Environment, Risk, and Insurance) is an opportunity to address the climate crisis with economic innovation. This project will focus on the development of an open standard to enable insurers to access shared environmental, financial and risk data across organisations and silos. It provides the building blocks for UK insurers to innovate around climate risk, improve their current products and create new products that will cover new and more types of risks, creating both private and public good.

We need better ways to share data --- robustly, legally and securely --- that create value, rather than leaving it in stagnant data lakes. An addressable, open marketplace built around the needs of both the market and our climate reality will enable insurance companies to invest in measurably low-carbon financial products and services.

The primary challenges are culture and business models. Organisations are stuck in legacy models that hold data 'closed' (negotiating access and uses on a case-by-case basis) instead of taking 'shared' or 'open' approaches (using pre-emptive licensing and web-based systems). High transaction costs (in time, process and money) are stopping asset owners, funders and insurers from working with data at scale. This is limiting creativity in finding new models, products and market solutions.

We are holding back innovation: data is not discoverable; is not clearly licenced for use; is not in formats that people or machines can easily manipulate. SERI is innovative in that it will create the conditions that will allow insurers and the wider insurance ecosystem to use data at scale. Standards that address this foundational 'data plumbing' will enable insurance businesses to innovate and the UK and its regions to plan policies and regulation to help protect citizens, their environment and economy, and accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence-based technologies in insurance.

SERI will convene the relevant stakeholders in the insurance industry, in policy and science and asset owners to define an open standard for catalysing data access across the insurance sector. This will enable the use and adoption of artificial intelligence tools within the insurance sector.