Insureblocks Blockchain & Smart Contracts In Insurance

On the 12th of May 2019, Insureblocks went on a 2 week road trip across the United States of America. This trip took us from the International Finance Corporation in Washington D.C. to the North American Contingency Associaiton in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. From there we headed to New York City to run a blockchain cross industry workshop at R3's offices before heading to Connecticut to run a blockchain presentation to the Connecticut Captive Insurance Association. Throughout this trip we interviewed a number of individuals from insurance professionals to regulators and to professionals from the pharmaceutical industry: Nicholas Hanes, Senior Vice President, Underwriting and MGA Operations at Spotted Inc. and Vice President of NACA. Philip Mershon, Senior Account Manager - Entertainment at OneBeacon Insurance Group Dempsey Lulley, Risk Insurance Administrator at WeWork Philippe Heilberg, co-Founder & COO/CFO at Arbol Inc.  Flora Nanda, Senior Manager, Blockchain at Pfizer Michael Fulton, Assoc

Blockchain is one of many new emerging technologies alongside AI, machine learning, robotics and much more. Most insurance companies unfortunately look at these technologies in silos and thus get a limited return on their investment. BlockClaim is an exciting insurtech that had the foresight to design an offering that combines both AI, machine learning and blockchain. In this exciting podcast we had the pleasure of interviewing Niels Thoné, CEO of BlockClaim, who passionately shared his insights on the convergence of AI, machine learning and blockchain.   What is blockchain? On a high level blockchain is all about storing and processing sensitive information, like financial transactions, on a lot of different computers rather than with a single central authority. What this means is that the need for trust in a central authority is removed because if it fails the network doesn’t fail. For BlockClaim, a private blockchain is a great way to connect various actors with different systems, software or legacy IT in

For this week’s podcast we continue into our theme at looking at new technologies that constitute the “New Stack”. Dessa is a company that specialises in offering artificial intelligence solutions to enterprises. We had the pleasure of having Paul Brikis, insurance lead at Dessa shares his thoughts on AI & Blockchain.   What is blockchain? To define what is blockchain, or even just to conceptualist it, Paul played a little game with Walid. Paul: Let’s pretend that we’re going to assign my phone a store value and possession determines ownership. Let’s imagine there are no other phones in the room and I’m holding the phone. If I ask you, Walid, who owns the phone, what would you say. Walid: I would say you own it. Paul: Exactly there's none other ones in the room. You know it's very easy to see that ownership is mine. So, let's pretend I pass the phone over to you and let's ask the same question who owns the phone. Walid: Well technically I would say it's still you as you just passed it over. Paul:Sure, b

Susan Joseph has been working in the blockchain area for the past 4 – 5 years. As a lawyer she has consulted with the insurance industry and most recently was the North American representative for B3i, the blockchain for insurance consortium. In this podcast we discuss two of Susan’s passion: “Innovation and diversity in the insurance industry”.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a foundational technology that provides a highly flexible set of tools allowing businesses, governments and others to re-examine their commercial relationships. It brings opportunities for greatly enhanced efficiency and development of new products. Inherent in the technology is the ability for diverse parties to cooperate in a way where trust is brought about through cryptography or promoting diversity through the development of the technology in the belief that the widest spectrum of perspectives will foster the most valuable innovations. On a more technical side it is an additional communication layer on the internet / web 3.0

Trade associations play a leading role in educating the business community on the opportunities of blockchain. In this podcast we had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick South, Vice President of Development at the Digital Chamber of Commerce in Washington D.C. The Chamber of Digital Commerce is the world’s leading trade association representing the digital asset and blockchain industry.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a combinatorial innovation. Think of it like a Lego bucket in which people are pulling existing Lego pieces and piecing them together in new innovative ways. Blockchain is leveraging existing proven technologies such as linked lists, asymmetric key parenting and hash functions in new and innovative ways. Blockchain is a distributed ledger is a distributed ledger that records and maintains data in a manner that allows multiple stakeholders to securely share access to the same information in digital aspects. In today's environment we have all these disparate databases that require constant

For this week podcast we continue our theme on how to build effective governance solutions in a blockchain ecosystem. This time we had the pleasure of having Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera join us to share his insights on how to build effective governance.   What is blockchain? At a very high level, blockchain is an evolution of database technology. In traditional database technology you can have a multi master database solution, which is essentially like having multiple copies of a same master database. It’s a replicated database with identical information in every instance. As users connect to these master databases to make updates to them you sometimes have what is called a write conflict. Meaning that the collection of all these databases need to come to an agreement on which one of those master databases was modified first. The assumption has always been that one organisation would manage all of those master databases. Whilst that may be fine in some scenario it doesn’t quite work in one where for example

This is a very special podcast for us as it is our first debate format on Insureblocks. We were extremely privileged to have two titans/Jedi Masters from the blockchain community join us for this podcast. On one side we have Richard Brown, Chief Technology Officer from R3, builders of Corda, advocating for enterprises to use private blockchain systems. Whilst on the other side we’ve got John Wolpert, Team Lead at Web 3 Studio at Consensys, builders of Ethereum based blockchains, advocating for enterprises to use public blockchain systems. Have a listen to this fascinating podcast and if you’d like for Insureblocks to organise more debates on our show, do let us know.   About Richard and R3 Richard is the Chief Technology Officer at R3 an enterprise software firm that are the founders of Corda. Corda is an open source blockchain platform designed for the enterprise world. R3 initially began as a consortium of large financial firms trying to figure out what opportunity does blockchain represent for their firm

For the uninitiated, governance may seem like a side note. But in this exciting podcast, Thomas Cox, Chief Governance Officer at StrongBlock, is here to talk to us about “Governance 101 in a blockchain ecosystem”. Prior to StrongBlock, Thomas worked at Block.one which raised $4 billion in an ICO and launched the crypto currency EOS. He helped them set up their governance infrastructure. It was the first blockchain technology that allowed for governance to be done on chain in a variety of different ways.   What is blockchain? A blockchain is just a ledger that has very serious promises around safety and security. When something is recorded on that ledger you can’t deny that it was there, you can’t change it and if you try to you will leave fingerprints of your attempt. This now creates a shared source of trust with players within your ecosystem. So instead of having insurance carriers and brokers disputing each versions of their respective truth you now have a shared system that all parties can be working fro

For this week’s episode, we spoke to Kshitij Nangia, Director – COO Strategy at Aon, and Michiel Berende, Inclusive Insurance Lead at Etherisc. Our guests provide us with an introduction to the notion of inclusive insurance along with insights as to how blockchain can help increase insurance penetration in emerging markets such as Sri Lanka. Etherisc has teamed up with Aon and Oxfam in Sri Lanka to offer small hold farmers weather-based crop insurance.   About our guests Michiel started out as an underwriter at Interpolis, a Dutch insurance company. He moved on to work closely with the DHAN foundation to explore micro-finance and microinsurance solutions within India. As with most blockchain enthusiasts, he discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and was intrigued by how Bitcoin could facilitate small transaction values at a relatively low cost. Kshitij has a background in strategy consulting. Prior to joining Aon in 2014, he worked in India and Chile as a strategy consultant in financial services. He is currently part

This is a bonus podcast as Insureblocks was invited to attend the All Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain at the House of Parliament on Monday the 18th of March. It was a fascinating session hosted by MP Damien Moore with opening remarks from MP and Minister for the Digital and Creative Industries Margot James and blockchain advocate MEP Emma McClarkin. Presentations were made by IOTA on Global Trade, by Oracle on the food supply chain, Everledger on the diamond supply chain and finally Lloyd’s of London, on behalf of the London Market Target Operating Model (LMTOM) program -  Insurance, Claims and transaction settlement. We interviewed a number of the delegates by asking them what they were hoping to achieve at this event and in their opinion how the UK government could support blockchain. We would like to thank the following participants for participating to this “Pulse” episode, in order of appearance: Daniel McCoy Andrade, head of business development at Photocert Emma McClarkin, Member of the Eu

In this exciting podcast, our 50th, we had the great pleasure of having Magda Ramada Sarasola, EMEA Insurtech Innovation Leader, at Willis Towers Watson return to Insureblocks. In this fireside chat we discussed the emergence of a new stack – the convergence of blockchain, AI, IoT, big data, machine learning and robotics. This podcast sits at the epicentre of a pivot we’re doing at Insureblocks for 2019. In addition to reporting stories on blockchain within the insurance industry, Insureblocks is going to embrace three new themes: Cover new industries: finance, supply chain logistics, food and agriculture, automobile and transportation, and healthcare. The aim is to investigate their blockchain learnings and facilitate the sharing of best practice across industries Investigate how blockchain sits with this new technology stack that includes AI, IoT, machine learning, big data, and robotics. We believe  that while they’re noteworthy the potential these technologies have individually is limited but once c

The word blockchain can create a whole range of emotions ranging from excitement to fear. In this podcast we had the pleasure to have Mark Simpson, Head of Consultancy at Armour Risk, take us through the Psychology of Blockchain.   What is blockchain? Mark prefer to lift it to describe what Distributed Ledger Technology is (of which blockchain is a type of DLT) Simply - Digital and decentralised books of record A bit more complex - DLT is a database held and updated independently by each participant (or node) in a network – the distributed bit. Updates to the ledger are independently constructed and recorded by each node. The nodes then vote on these updates (different methods) to ensure that the majority agrees with the conclusion reached. This voting and agreement on one copy of the ledger is called consensus, and is conducted automatically by a consensus algorithm. Once consensus has been reached, the distributed ledger updates itself and the latest, agreed-upon version of the ledger is saved on each

Welcome to another episode in ours News Flash series, where we share the latest developments in the blockchain space, straight off the press. Today we are joined again by David Edwards, CEO of ChainThat, who previously featured in Ep.8 – Building a Blockchain PoC/Pilot, and we welcome Rebecca Oliver, business development director at ChainThat,  to Insureblocks for the first time. About ChainThat David Edwards formed ChaintThat in 2015 with the sole focus to see how blockchain distributed ledger technology can impact commercial speciality insurance and reinsurance. Since there early start ChainThat cover the entire value chain from the placement process to technical and financial accounting, settlement, claims administration and facilities, tax and regulatory reporting. ChainThat has received investment from Xceedance and has now grown to about 30 staff.   Launching the world’s first technology-driven insurance and reinsurance risk and capital exchange ChainThat’s new initiative is to launch in Bermuda the mo

For most firms getting a good understanding of what is blockchain and its possible use is a challenging exercise. Once that has been established a further decision has to be made regarding whether or not to build their blockchain solution on a public or private blockchain system. Within the first two weeks of January 2019, both the public and private blockchain proponents expressed their views on the merits of their systems. For this podcast we had the pleasure of having Richard Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, the builders of Corda, a private blockchain system, express his views.   Who is R3? R3 is an enterprise software company that produces an open-source blockchain called Corda. Corda was first launched in 2016, initially for financial services sectors, mainly banks. However, it was the insurance industry that helped broaden Corda’s view and utility as a blockchain for other industries. Now in 2019, Corda has launched the 4thversion of Corda which has already been adopted by finance, insurance, he

Often not considered as “sexy” in the blockchain world, but building effective governance is probably one of the most important tasks in building a resilient blockchain ecosystem. For this podcast we were very privileged to have James Carlyle, Head of Network and Operations at R3.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that makes a fundamental promise which is “what I see, is what you see”. The idea being that although people share a common view, they actually have their own copies of data and that matter for numerous reasons such as the one of control. . It means with a copy of their own data and the promise that what they see is what the other side sees, that they don't need to rely on intermediaries.   What is governance? I always say if you haven't figured out who is in control, it's because you haven't been looking hard enough; there is someone there Governance is about control first and foremost. What had initially attracted James to Ethereum was the idea of an unstoppable wor

For this episode we were fortuitous to reconnect with Dante Disparte Founder and CEO of Risk Cooperative to look back on how blockchain has evolved in the insurance industry in 2018 and what we can expect for 2019.   What is blockchain? For the insurance industry, Dante describes blockchain as a bordereau or a ledger that exists simultaneously in an exact form across multiple distributed computer systems. From the outset this creates a level of resilience, a level of tamper proofing that you don’t get from existing technologies today.   Retrospective of blockchain in the insurance industry in 2018 “Still the beginning” “Still the beginning” is how Dante would characterise blockchain in the insurance industry. In spite of Bitcoin recently celebrating its 10thanniversary, it’s really only been in 2018 that we started seeing large scale enterprise tinkering with blockchain technology. In January 2018, Dante penned an article “One Thing Is Clear From Davos, Blockchain Is Out Of Beta” in Forbes, where he stated

In this week’s episode we explore how can we automate the claims process with blockchain. Our guest for this topic is Bobbie Shrivastav, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Benekiva. Bobbie has 15 years experience in the technology field. In 2015, in addition to becoming a parent Bobbie started working on Benekiva after realising all the inefficiencies in the insurance industry.   What is Blockchain? Blockchain is magic? That magic pill that we have all been waiting for? Bobbie describes blockchain as a ledger of transactional records that is permanent and immutable, i.e. it can’t be changed. In addition it is distributed across a permission based or permissionless based blockchain and is append only.   What is Benekiva? Benekiva is a technology platform that is here to bridge the gap between carriers, policy holders and beneficiaries via claims automation, asset retention and data management. Benekiva claims to be the only stand alone claims platform for life and annuity that focuses on the customer.

Last week we had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Markus Kaulartz, lawyer at CMS Germany, discuss with us the very hot topic of Blockchain & GDPR. We will try to answer the question of how does GDPR, drafted in a world in which centralised and identifiable actors control personal data, sit within a decentralised world like blockchain? Markus is the co-author of "The tension between GDPR and the rise of blockchain technologies". Markus works in the IT law department of CMS Germany with a focus on innovative topics such as blockchain, AI, cyber security and all the data protection issues. Previously to becoming a lawyer, Markus used to work as a software developer.   What is Blockchain? From a pure legal point of view there are two aspects: Blockchain is a database which is distributed and synchronised, whose data cannot be deleted. This definition however is controversial within some quarters as blockchain isn't considered as a database but it is used to simplify defining it for a non-IT audience. Blockch

Last week we had the pleasure to talk to Hugh Karp, founder of Nexus Mutual, about their insights on how blockchain and smart contracts can be used for building effective insurance mutual. This is Hugh’s second appearance on Insureblocks as he was a guest blogger last September where he penned a post on “Public Blockchains in Insurance: Do incumbents need to worry?”   What is Blockchain? Hugh believes it is more interesting to focus on what the technology enables instead on focusing on the technical description of it. Blockchain gives a shared view on some sort of information, so that everyone can agree on the information and that it can only be changed by playing by the rules. Examples of such information are account balances and the rules could be a combination of smart contract logic and consensus process to add new information to the blockchain. In Bitcoin that consensus process is mining for example. Once we have shared information that all parties can agree on, and self enforcing rules, we can coordi

For this week’s episode, we are joined by Olivier Rikken,  Director of blockchain and smart contracts at Axveco– a consultancy firm based out of the Netherlands focusing on sustainable innovation. Olivier last spoke to us in April regarding smart contracts – this episode focuses on the legal aspects of blockchain and smart contracts. Since April last year, Olivier has been involved in a wide range of blockchain related projects which include being part of the ISO World Standards working group on smart contracts. In addition to his role as a start-up coach for blockchain-enabled start-ups within and outside the Netherlands, Olivier is part of the governance group for the Dutch Blockchain Coalition and is a guest lecturer at three universities in the Netherlands.   Blockchain in two minutes According to Olivier, blockchain is a decentralised database – a shared administration system where everyone who wishes to join may do so and participate (reading, writing and validating content.) There is no need for a tr