OpenDH is a free, openly licensed suite of software for EN 18356 / CEN-TS 18356 — the EU's new data-exchange standard for insurance and financial-data access under the FIDA regulation. No open, reusable implementation of it exists yet. OpenDH is building one.
CEN/TC 445 is the European technical committee responsible for digital data-interchange standards across the financial industry — insurance, banking, investments, and pensions. It is currently developing EN 18356 and CEN/TS 18356: the semantic data model and technical API specification that will let insurers (and eventually other financial-data holders) share customer data in a single, standardised way, as required under the EU's proposed Financial Data Access (FIDA) regulation.
As of today, no open, reusable software implementation of this standard exists anywhere. OpenDH is building one — starting with motor insurance, the line of business scheduled first under FIDA's phased rollout — so that insurers, brokers, and developers across the EU have a free, independent way to check their own systems against the real standard, rather than relying on closed, proprietary tooling.
OpenDH is being built as four separate, complementary pieces. Each is useful on its own, and each is funded and delivered as its own, independent step.
A conformance checker for motor-insurance records against the EN 18356 / CEN-TS 18356 schema. No live API calls, no authentication — just a precise, well-tested check of a single record. The first OpenDH component.
An open reference implementation of the data-holder side of the standard's API — a working example other implementers can run, compare against, and learn from.
A library for the data-user side — consuming data from a standard-conformant data holder without re-implementing the API handling from scratch.
A full end-to-end test suite that exercises a live data-holder implementation against the standard, building on the validator's own rules.
OpenDH is built by Michael Ermogenous, an independent software developer with 18 years building live insurance systems in production, including a multi-tenant policy administration platform in active commercial use. He is also Cyprus's National Representative to CEN/TC 445 Working Group 1 — the committee actually developing this standard — giving the project direct, first-hand visibility into the standard as it's finalised.
All OpenDH code is released under the MIT License — free to use, modify, and build on, for any purpose, commercial or otherwise. No restrictions, no bait-and-switch, no paid tier hiding behind an open label.
Code repository — coming soon. OpenDH will be published as open source on GitHub; this section will link directly to it once the first release is public.
Questions, feedback, or interested in contributing? [email protected]
