ATTITUDES towards sharing information between maritime counterparties have changed a lot in recent years, believes Eric Christofferson, chief product officer at the digital solutions provider Veson Nautical. In this podcast, for example, he recalls that shipowners were once very protective of information about their ships’ positions but now it is essential information and is easily available via Automatic Identification System-enabled apps and services.

Counterparties to shipping contracts are coming to understand the benefits of sharing data, he says, including its ability to support an audit trail behind the decisions that were taken. He suggests, too, that environmental targets can also provide an incentive to collaborate, for example by sharing data to agree on port arrival times that will both reduce fuel consumption for the shipowner and support the cargo owner’s green objectives.

With data at the heart of statutes such as the FuelEU Maritime regulation, Christofferson predicts that more such data-centric requirements will emerge across the globe, a trend that is already creating uncertainty for companies and traders “because of new added variables… and I don’t think that will change”, he says.

He also says that data’s role in both commerce and compliance has changed the maritime landscape, predicting that standards will emerge to make it easier to share information.

He also has views on how those will be developed. “We’ll start to see some solution providers step in to provide standard ways of calculating things that are accepted on both sides of the trade,” he says in the podcast, citing the collaboration between Veson Nautical and Intertanko on the long-standing Questionnaire 88, known as “Q88”, as an example of an existing industry standard for exchanging information.

“We’ll see standards around more specific aspects of the business emerge over time that will make it easier for people to exchange information,” he predicts. But these must be easy to use and be well explained; “there’s a lot of room for improvement”, he says.

At a company level, decision makers who rely on data have two concerns, he suggests. First, they need to be confident that the data they are using is of high quality and, second, they need to have the right data at the right time. Once those certainties are in place, decision makers “can focus their unique skill… in a new way.”

Asked whether better data is sufficient to ensure better decisions, he suggested that what matters is having multiple sources of data that can be cross-checked, perhaps with different aspects of a decision using different selections of data sources. He calls this “duplicative” data sourcing, which “elevates the ability to verify it and have a better-quality outcome.”