Can shipping use data sharing to ease the burden of financial claims?

Researchers claim that a new system aimed at facilitating communication between different port actors can possibly help make financial claims a thing of the past.

The Port CDM Concept is an idea being developed within the STM Validation project and aims to create time stamps and a common communication language between different businesses involved in a vessel’s port call.

In the latest concept note published here on Fathom World the authors, led by Mikael Lind, an associate professor focusing on sustainable transport  at the Swedish research body, RISE Viktoria and co-founder of the International PortCDM Council, argue that a vessel owner, and other parties that are highly transparent with data, can provide the necessary data to better validate many financial claims.

“For example, if a shipping company had access to a port’s system of record it would be able to see when and where a specific ship received services from a pilotage company, tug service, linesman provider,and so forth. Validation of port call expense claims is an important potential by-product of the spatial-temporal data collected under Port Collaborative Decision Making (PortCDM) – as one of the enablers of the Sea Traffic Management (STM) concept,” write the authors.

They liken this idea to that seen in other parts of the industry, such as the fairly recent ‘pay-as-you-sail’ approach to the use of electronic charts that relies on vessel positioning data to create transparency of billing. In this latest concept note, Lind and the other authors use some examples of existing practices for the calculation and verification of financial claims, and elaborate on how increased data sharing could raise processing efficiency and lower the potential for fraud exposure and mitigate potential associated compliance risks.

“The key, we assert, is to enable matching of the records of a ship’s voyage with the associated accounts received for services rendered during a port call. Essentially, certain expenses can be validated by matching the spatial-temporal data that defines the voyage and the associated financial claims”

Download the latest Concept Note here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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