Blockchain for Insurance: Insurance Market Report 2020

2020 has marked immense progress in the insurance industry, as the leading blockchain consortia, B3i and The Institute’s RiskStream Collaborative, have announced significant developments in their transformational Corda-powered solutions. RiskStream Collaborative – the insurance industry’s largest enterprise-level blockchain consortium – have successfully completed member-to-member testing of its personal lines auto proof of insurance application, and B3i has partnered with Ritablock GmbH (Reinsurance Technical Accounting Blockchain) to launch the first live partner application on the B3i Fluidity platform. These important milestones for insurance are paving the way to greater efficiency and customer service, demonstrating the power of blockchain to transform industries.

Our recently published 2020 Mid-Year Insurance Report discusses developments in how blockchain – and more specifically Corda – is being used for solutions in the insurance industry. This blog post will highlight key takeaways from the report, which you can find in full here.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Insurance

New blockchain solutions are being imagined in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought to light new challenges for insurers. Insurance has seen a reduction in premium income and slow growth, but also an increase in service requests; these sudden changes have put pressure on the current processes in place. This is where Corda comes in: it will be a crucial component in creating new distributed solutions and platforms to o solve newly revealed challenges in underdeveloped areas of insurance, including business interruption coverage and dual trigger policy.

Corda for Insurance 

Corda is a perfect match for the insurance industry; it solves inefficiencies and high expenses by replacing slow, manual processes and interactions with secure, private and scalable transactions and communication on-ledger. Corda powered applications have demonstrated a reduction in processing times and costs, whilst increasing trust between parties.

Customers on Corda

R3’s partners creating insurance solutions on Corda include consultancies, start-ups, and consortia in the industry.

  • B3i has created Fluidity an all-encompassing insurance platform from which participants can build their own applications – and the B3i Reinsurance solution, an application which focuses on the Cat XoL market.
  • CryptoBLK’s MIDAS – a motor insurance authentication system made in collaboration with the Hong Kong Federation of Insurers – currently has over 60 live nodes and is being developed to developed to provision the digitisation of documents for the insurance industry.
  • Ledgertech has successfully delievered a motor insurance pilot to Bharti AXA, which demonstrated a 15% – 20% reduction in Bharti AXA’s claim processing costs.
  • RiskStream Collaborative has developed Canopy, an integration layer that will allow insurers to streamline the production of future blockchain applications and share data with other chosen parties.

As well as leveraging Corda to reinvigorate market-level processes, 2020 has seen insurers building customer and partner focused solutions and considering blockchain for multinational cash flow management. These new trends – which are expected to emerge and go live over the next two years – demonstrate the plethora of possible use cases in insurance. 

2020 R3 Insurtech Challenge

Following its success in 2019, R3’s InsurTech Challenge has returned this year! InsurTech start-ups are accelerating their application development and are connecting with industry leaders in the competition to solve insurance pain points using Corda. The winner will receive a US$20,000 grant, a one-year Corda Enterprise license from R3, and an opportunity for a commercial pilot with a sponsor!

To learn more about the applications that our customers are building and the trends in insurance this year, read the full 2020 Mid-Year Insurance Report here.