The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is proposing to change the way it has treated data provided by Australia's insurance companies for decades by, in future, treating all data as non-confidential unless individual insurers convince it otherwise.
The regulator has sought comment from the insurance industry on its proposed change to the treatment of data, but is arguing that it will enable it to provide more comprehensive statistical analyses for the industry and the publication of product-level data.
It said it proposed to introduce group-level statistics and to incorporate more detailed industry-level statistics.
APRA said it recognised the public value of the data it collected and intended to make it more publicly accessible by determining the data to be "non-confidential".
The regulator acknowledged the legislation protecting the confidentiality of data provided by insurers, but said the application of confidentiality protection measures to the statistics might result in the publication of incomplete or less informative statistics.
Under the new approach being proposed by APRA, insurers would need to make submissions to have any particular elements of data remain confidential, including specifying how disclosure would lead to "detriment of commercial interests "and the extent to which that could occur".
