Insureblocks Blockchain & Smart Contracts In Insurance

Turlough O’Brien is Head of IT at Aviva Commercial and Aviva UK Blockchain advocate. In this podcast we discuss Aviva’s perspective and lessons learnt with blockchain technology. Aviva is the largest insurer in the UK. It’s a composite that spans right away from car insurance through to equity release products.   What is blockchain? Turlough defines blockchain as a mechanism for creating trust between peers in a distributed manner as opposed to today’s existing centralized trust models. From a technical perspective blockchain is a ledger of blocks. A block is comparable to a digital fingerprint or a unique representation of a piece of data, often a transaction. Once a new block is validated, it is then added to the ledger and cryptographically linked to the previous block. This creates the chain, which is then propagated across the network. This ensures that everyone on the network has confidence in the integrity of the chain.   Aviva and blockchain sAviva Ventures do a lot in terms of investing in start-up