Lloyd's List Intelligence Turns Vessel Vetting Into a Single Screen

Lloyd's List Intelligence has launched Vessel Due Diligence, a decision-support module for marine underwriters and vessel vetters that consolidates the scattered data behind a vetting or underwriting decision into one screening environment — attacking a manual process the company says currently costs each professional two to four hours every week. The problem it targets: before insuring or accepting a vessel, underwriters and vetters today check ships individually across multiple sources, pulling reports and comparing operational records by hand — slow, inconsistent and hard to audit. What the module does: available as an add-on to the Seasearcher platform, it brings dry-dock status, machinery condition, inspections and port-call history into one operational view, and combines incidents, deficiencies, vessel arrests, seizures, class status and P&I information in a single screening panel — plus fleet-wide screening, historical port-call analysis, hull-risk indicators, behavioural intelligence and audit-ready decision support to keep judgments consistent across teams. Chief Product Officer Nicola Marlin frames it as a shift from fragmented data to genuine decision support, mirroring how these teams actually work. Why this matters for ship managers: vetting pressure flows downhill — sanctions exposure, the dark fleet and tightening insurance scrutiny mean your vessels are being screened more often and more deeply, and the data trail your fleet leaves (detentions, deficiencies, port calls) increasingly decides your insurability and charter access. Knowing what the screeners see is becoming part of managing a fleet. The honest caveat: the two-to-four-hours figure is the vendor's own framing of the problem, and the real test of any screening tool is its miss rate — ask how current the underlying data is and how the behavioural risk indicators are actually derived. [Digital Ship]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 19 July 2026.