The Market Reform Contract is the standard contract document of the London insurance market — the structured slip that brokers and underwriters place risk against. Its machine-readable descendants, the JSON Market Reform Contract (JMRC) and MRCv3, together with Lloyd's Core Data Record, are the closest thing global insurance has to a standard, callable representation of an insurance contract.
Market Reform Contract
The MRC is a document standard that became a data standard, and the way it happened inverts how standards usually travel.
- MRC - The market-wide contract document, with defined headings, that the London subscription market places risk against.
- MRCv3 - The current generation, generated by contract-builder software and consumed by the market’s digital placing platforms.
- JMRC - A JSON representation of the contract. It was authored by a commercial placing platform, Whitespace, and donated to ACORD for the GRLC data standards programme.
- Lloyd’s Core Data Record - The market’s definition of the data that must accompany a risk, tying the contract to downstream processing.
- Live in a contract - Whitespace’s platform specification carries ACORD tagset references directly, and exposes an alternative tagset as a path parameter.
This is the one place in global insurance where a working data standard and a public API genuinely coexist, and the sequence matters: the standard followed the API rather than the API following the standard. The State of UK Insurance APIs found the MRC surviving into a machine-readable layer at exactly two organizations, and named thirteen times in the Documents API of the market’s placing platform — the only place the contract object reaches software as a first-class resource.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of UK Insurance APIs
The JSON Market Reform Contract was authored by a commercial placing platform and donated to ACORD — and the MRC reaches machine-readable form at exactly two organizations.
