We publish our wordings.
A new product should not start with a blank page. We publish our financial-lines wordings — open, versioned like software, and free to use with your capacity provider’s approval — so an agency can start from a reviewed base and spend its effort on appetite, service and price.
The library
Eight financial-lines wordings, published as HTML and as Word originals.
The library lives at commons.cuttleflow.com, served from a public GitHub repository so that every change to a wording is a tracked, reviewable diff rather than a new file in a shared drive. All eight are working drafts, marked DRAFT — SUBJECT TO LEGAL REVIEW — NOT FOR USE, and none may be issued or bound until Wording Partner sign-off.
Professional Indemnity Insurance
Civil-liability cover for professional services, written on a claims-made basis.
2026/DO/0001 · v1.2.0Directors & Officers Liability Insurance
Cover for directors and officers against claims for wrongful acts in their roles.
2026/SADO/0001 · v1.2.0Side A Directors’ & Officers’ Liability
Non-indemnifiable-loss protection for individual directors and officers.
2026/ML/0001 · v1.2.0Management Liability Insurance
Combined cover for private companies — D&O, employment practices, and more.
2026/IMI/0001 · v1.2.0Investment Managers Indemnity Insurance
Professional indemnity and D&O cover for investment managers and funds.
2026/CY/0002 · v1.3.0Cyber Insurance
First- and third-party cover for cyber events and data breaches.
2026/CRI/0001 · v1.2.0Comprehensive Crime Insurance
Cover for loss from employee and third-party crime — fraud, theft, social engineering.
2026/TL/0001 · v1.3.0Comprehensive Technology Liability Insurance
Combined technology professional and product liability, with cyber and general-liability layers.
Wording partners
Firms that work with the Commons.
Adopting an open wording still means engaging your own lawyers — to review it against your appetite and capacity terms, endorse it for your book, and act when a claim comes in. A panel of independent Australian insurance law firms is familiar with the Commons library and available to be engaged directly for wording review and claims work on Commons-based policies. Firm names are published here as each listing is confirmed.
Wording review · Claims
Malcolm Cameron · National Practice Group Leader, Specialty Lines
Sparke Helmore Lawyers · Level 29, 25 Martin Place, Sydney NSW 2000
t: +61 2 9373 1485 · f: +61 2 9373 3599
Listing is not endorsement. Wording partners listed here do not endorse, approve, or stand behind any Commons wording, and no firm has reviewed or signed off any draft in this library unless a review letter from that firm says so. Panel firms have indicated they are happy to work with Commons wordings for their own clients, on their own terms and at their own rates. Each firm acts only for the clients that engage it; nothing here creates a lawyer–client relationship, and Cuttleflow receives no fee for these listings.
Taking part
Two routes in, deliberately kept apart.
Anyone can comment on a wording — sign in with a GitHub login. If you would rather change the words themselves, a free GitHub account lets you edit the wording text directly in your browser and send the change to us; GitHub records exactly which words you added or removed. Neither route changes a published wording on its own — a change is made only after review and sign-off, and is then released as a new version.
The argument
Markets have solved this before.
Australia has already done this once. The Industrial Special Risks Mark IV wording has served as the market’s shared base for large property risks since the 1980s: insurers issue it with their own endorsements and compete on appetite, service and price rather than on redrafting the base document. The Commons applies the same idea to financial lines.
A wording is infrastructure. Treating it like software — versioned, diffable, tested, published — makes it auditable in a way a Word document in a shared drive never is.
How it works
Versioned in public
Every wording carries a version. Changes are diffs with reasons, not silent replacements — so you can prove which words were on risk at the moment of bind.
Adversarially audited
Each wording is attacked before publication by a reader whose job is to find the hole — coverage gaps, circular definitions, orphaned defined terms. We publish the process; the findings stay in the workshop.
Yours to use
Free to adopt with your capacity provider’s approval, on an open licence. Adopting them is never a condition of using anything else we build.
Open protocols
The language of the market belongs to the market.
The same principle applies to the rails. Australian commercial placement still moves over a proprietary, vendor-owned message rail designed in the EDI era. We intend to publish the venue’s placement protocols — lifecycle, message formats, schemas, and the Australian premium components (state duty, GST, emergency services levy, terrorism premium) as named, defined fields — openly and royalty-free, for anyone to implement, including our competitors. That grant would be made in the protocol documents themselves, is intended to survive a change of control and not to be withdrawn from documents already published; breaking changes would carry six months’ notice; and published mappings to established international standards mean nobody has to abandon what they already built.
Running code first: the protocol will document what the venue actually runs, and a change would publish as standard only after it operates in production — where document and venue disagree, the document gets corrected. Open protocols do not mean an open-source operator: the matching engine, the sealed-bid clearing mechanism and the ledger remain ours. The commitment is to the language of the market — the machinery stays ours.
The draft Marketplace Constitution (governance of the venue) →
Where this is up to
The Meridian financial-lines suite is drafted and subject to legal review, and readable now at commons.cuttleflow.com under CC BY 4.0 — as drafts, not as wordings you can bind. The open-protocols grant sits in the protocol documents themselves, which publish at the venue’s go-live. Ask us for the current state and we will tell you.