RMS Announces Public Availability of the Risk Data Open Standard

NEWARK, CA – February 03, 2020 – RMS^® today announced that the Risk Data Open Standard (RDOS) was made available on January 31, 2020 for download from the leading open source public repository.

RDOS is a modern data schema for the risk modeling community, representing the new, open standard for holding all types of risk data, including exposure, coverage, model settings, and results of analyses. Purpose-built for the risk industry, RDOS is a living open standard guided by real-world practitioners who demand the interoperability and portability required to handle the scale and complexity of modern risk management.

Unlike current risk data standards, RDOS is designed for any type of model and any type of business and contains a complete and unambiguous description of exposure and analysis. RDOS is currently backward compatible with today’s leading industry standards – RMS Exposure Data Model (EDM) and Results Data Model (RDM) – and is extensible to support other data standards and models.

Today’s announcement is a culmination of a multi-year development effort and eight-month industry review period, initially spearheaded by RMS, to provide the most robust risk data schema to the industry by tapping the expertise and ongoing contributions of a thriving risk modeling community. RMS is now releasing the first version of RDOS for open source development. From this point forward, anyone is free to review, use, and contribute to the standard, under an Apache 2.0 license. Future priorities and updates will be guided by a steering committee currently made up of 15 companies from the world’s leading (re)insurers.

“We’re in the business of risk and understand the nuances and challenges that it presents. The current leading data standard – the coin of the realm in the industry – is RMS’s proprietary EDM. However, legacy systems and decades-old technology, ours or other vendors, cannot leverage big data or support the high-gradient models required to understand new perils and emerging risks to gain a deeper understanding of risk within and across lines,” said Karen White, Chief Executive Officer of RMS. “A lack of data interoperability and loss of risk data inherent with today’s proprietary standards costs the industry billions of dollars a year. A new way of thinking and a more innovative, flexible and transparent approach will serve the industry well as it moves into the future. By introducing RDOS, we’re ushering in a new era of accessibility and collaboration. We would like to thank the RDOS Steering Committee for their guidance. Together, we’re helping the industry gain a more powerful understanding of these risks and helping to enable a new risk market to emerge.”

“Other vendor-led, open-source projects have proven that wider industry collaboration is possible,” said Cihan Biyikoglu, Executive Vice President of Product at RMS. “These approaches have created successful, thriving open source projects. For example, Google’s Kubernetes and Yahoo’s Apache Hadoop have thousands of contributors, many from competing companies. We are using a similar template and open approach to develop a shared standard for the insurance and financial services industries.”

Benefits for the Industry

RDOS offers:

• Completeness – improving efficiency and reducing errors by providing an unambiguous, auditable, and complete view of analysis
• Flexibility – supporting interoperability and new types of models with a data structure that can support a wide range of modeling algorithms and technologies
• Extensibility – enabling risk modelers to add insight and value to lines of business beyond property in a single container
• Technology choice – providing the ability to harness the power of advanced object-relational database technologies

Ryan Ogaard, Senior Vice President of Model Product Management at RMS added: “RDOS provides the most holistic view of risk. It can handle any type of model, any line of business, and any financial terms and conditions. Other formats rely only on SQL, which has inherent limitations. The RDOS is not locked into any specific technology and can be physically implemented in different manners.”

With RDOS, risk-focused companies such as insurers and the financial services firms that transact on risk will increase efficiencies and maximize opportunities.

RDOS is available now on GitHub: https://github.com/RMS-open-standards/RDOS 

Related Links:

Press release: RMS Redefines Today’s Standard With The Risk Data Open Standard

Risk Data Open Standard steering committee website: www.riskdataos.org

ENDS