The insurance industry has been collaborating to develop blockchain technology adoption. The three major insurance consortia B3i, RiskBlock Alliance and Insurwave all aim to improve efficiency and cut costs. All three groups are building their products on top of R3 Corda blockchain platform.
This platform is a great fit for the insurance industry. It was designed with the the financial industry in mind, but is essentially focused on data security. One of the biggest factors in these three groups choosing the same platform is interoperability. All insurance solutions built on Corda will be able to operate between each other seamlessly.
“What we really liked about the Corda design is that they share information only on a transaction level between parties, so they are not putting transactions into blocks and sharing transactions with parties that are not involved, and this was very important to us. It’s crucial for us that transaction information is private between counterparties.” – Markus Tradt, CTO of B3i
B3i
The group was initially created by Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re and Zurich, but within one year, had added 23 new members including AIG and AIA. The consortium announced in March that it is transitioning into an independent company incorporated in Switzerland in order to “streamline the development, testing and commercialization of blockchain solutions.” B3i was initially building their prototype on Hyperledger Fabric of IBM, but switched R3 Corda last month.
The RiskBlock Alliance
A Pennsylvania-based risk and insurance group The Institutes launched this group earlier in 2018, and was quickly joined by 18 companies. RiskBlock announced last week that it will build its first use cases on R3’s Corda platform, even though they had experimented with a private Ethereum network.
Insurwave
Guardtime and EY jointly developed Insurwave. The shipping industry focused platform uses Microsoft Azure’s cloud services in combination with the R3 Corda blockchain. The largest container shipping company, Maersk, started using the platform in May.
