Three technology vendors serving Canadian brokers have earned the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations’ (CSIO) API Security Standards Certification. CSIO is pushing for common security practices as the P&C industry moves toward real-time data exchange.
AlStar Solutions, Logiciels Deltek Inc. and Trufla Technology have all achieved the certification. It shows they apply CSIO’s common model for authentication and authorization when exchanging information with insurers and other partners.
CSIO said shared security standards help build trust between technology providers and insurers and bring more consistency to the broker channel as connections become more real-time.
The certification comes at a time of heightened focus on how insurers and their partners connect. This month, critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language behind a large share of the world’s websites, led organizations across several countries to take systems offline as a precaution.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s latest cyber insurance report also warned that shared technology, including common cloud providers, software platforms and vendors, is increasingly shaping cyber risk and creating the potential for losses that hit many organizations at once.
APIs, the connections that let broker management systems, insurer platforms and other tools exchange data, are among those shared dependencies. Common authentication and authorization rules reduce the chance that weak or inconsistent security at one link in the chain exposes data across the network.
“Protecting information while enabling more seamless digital connections is an important priority for AlStar,” said Stanley Tso, AlStar’s chief technology officer.
Deltek president David Larkin said the certification reflects the company’s commitment to standards that let brokers and insurers exchange information with confidence. Trufla chief executive Sherif Gemayel said security and consistency are critical as brokers rely more on connected digital tools.
The API security program sits alongside CSIO’s other certifications, including eDocs, which standardizes how insurer documents are labelled in brokers’ systems. Earlier this month, APRIL Canada, Maple Mutual, Yarmouth Mutual and SynthMind Technology earned eDocs certification.
CSIO is encouraging more insurers and vendors to adopt the API security standards, and publishes a list of certified members on its website.
For brokers, the certifications give a way to assess the vendors they depend on. When choosing broker management, quoting or client portal software, brokers can ask whether a vendor meets CSIO’s security standards. With vendor-related incidents now a recognized source of correlated cyber losses, third-party security is increasingly part of brokers’ own risk management, and of their cyber insurance applications.
