Insurers, reinsurers launch Blockchain initiative
Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re and Zurich have launched the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i aiming to explore the potential of distributed ledger technologies to better serve clients through faster, more convenient and secure services. If Blockchain technology proves viable, it could well streamline paper work and reconciliations for (re-) insurance contracts and accelerate information and money flows, while greatly improving auditability.
Blockchain offers huge potential for enabling digital contracts and transactions amongst multiple parties to be executed in a secure, transparent and auditable way. By establishing trusted relationships among all participants, Blockchain has the potential to provide a consistent, automatic contract execution environment where transactions and contracts are stored on a shared ledger, thus reducing the administrative workload of multiple stakeholders to ensure contract consistency and execution.
The Blockchain technology can only reach its full potential for stakeholders if implemented in a consistent and compatible way, based on minimum standards to exchange data and transactions via Blockchain. Therefore Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re and Zurich have agreed to cooperate for a pilot project, using anonymized transaction information and anonymized quantitative data, in order to achieve a proof-of-concept for inter-group retrocessions by the use of the Blockchain technology. With this feasibility study, the founding members aim to explore whether Blockchain technology can be used to develop standards and processes for industry-wide usage and to catalyze efficiency gains in the insurance industry.
“We are thrilled that Allianz is investigating emerging technologies such as Blockchain together with other key insurance industry players”, said Christof Mascher, Chief Operating Officer of Allianz Group. “This initiative, enabling alternative operating models based on the Blockchain technology, can help us increase transparency and efficiency and deliver a better experience to our customer.”
The Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i will allow insurers and reinsurers to get a better insight into the applicability of the Blockchain technology in the insurance market. In addition, B3i offers a platform to exchange insights regarding Blockchain and potentially other technologies, use case experiments and research information.
