A public reporting regime for life insurance claims information may be ready early next year, as regulators progress through the second round of pilot data collection.

Agreement has been reached on common definitions to help ensure consistent and comparable data, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission say.

The industry has also adopted the definitions.

“The agencies are now well advanced in their progress towards public reporting of claims and disputes in the life insurance industry,” APRA says.

“The agencies are confident the data will be sufficiently robust to support insurer-level publication by early [next year].

“This is due to the agencies’ work with industry in developing standard definitions of claims outcomes, and insurers improving their data quality.”

The regulators have also agreed in principle to a proposal by the Financial Services Council (FSC) that an independent expert be engaged to collect and analyse claims and dispute data.

“The FSC and its members wish to build on [the] existing claims handling data collection project to collect more granular information from the industry in a range of areas, including better information on the types of impairments claims are paid for,” the FSC says.