Maritime risk assessment and due diligence firm RightShip reports it has seen a significant interest in its new Vetting Criteria after expanding from 20 to 50 assessment considerations

RightShip has today announced that nearly 200 independent chartering organisations have moved to and are currently using its expanded Vetting Criteria, which has attracted new customers and reduced the need for charterers to apply a bespoke criteria to its vetting due to the innovative standardisation tools used in the process.

The new criteria extends beyond the previous version from 20 assessment items to 50 items which now includes separate and brand-new sections for flag and class, ship structures, engineering, and a comprehensive section on crew welfare.

Historically, many of RightShip’s chartering customers applied an additional bespoke criteria to their vetting process. Prior to the expanded criteria launch, there were 457 rules within the combined standards and customer specific requirements. In expanding the criteria, we have reduced this figure to 390, resulting in an 18 percent decrease in rules, and an increase in consistency for customers.

However, the enhanced standardisation enables customer to markedly reduce these filters. As a result, charterers experience a more comprehensive and thorough risk assessment, with 187 chartering customers moving to the expanded vetting process. This is also beneficial for shipowners, who can expect to experience far more consistent vetting expectations now that fewer bespoke rules are applied.

Strong standardisation of technical procedures and expectations has been a consistent challenge for the maritime industry. RightShip has improved data ingestion and made standardisation a priority in order to better serve the industry’s interests. This includes consolidated trends found from RightShip’s existing proprietary vessel vetting insights, cleansed incident database and close out reports and the addition of the latest industry requirements to the Vetting Criteria.

RightShip CEO Steen Lund said: “Standardisation of data sets is an imperative first step in our ambitious work towards significant improvements in maritime safety, sustainability and social welfare. Quality data is the foundation of reliable results that have significant implications for our customers.”

“We are investing in the practice of data standardisation that ensures both charterers and shipowners experience consistent, reliable outcomes that they can trust. It is just the beginning of an increased data transformation that RightShip is undertaking as we seek to influence the shift towards zero harm across the industry – within safety, within the wellbeing of seafarers and towards zero carbon shipping.”

RightShip’s Chief Product Officer, Christopher Saunders said interest in the expanded criteria had exceeded expectations and this reflected an industry-wide demand to provide consistent due diligence procedures to those who sought to run best practice operations.

“At present, we are taking on the feedback of customers and assessing the activity in our Platform to further standardise our data through sophisticated data warehousing and additional product development that will bolster our ability to provide, faster, more accurate outcomes for both our chartering and ship owning customers.”

RightShip vets more than 40,000 vessels a year, powered by an intelligent Platform and a global team of vetting superintendents. The new vetting criteria was applied from 30 June 2021.

You can download the RightShip’s Vetting Critiera here