All Big Insurers Are Uniting Behind R3's Blockchain Tech

R3 has scored another win in the insurance sector, giving the startup a wide lead over other distributed ledger technology providers in the sector.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the RiskBlock Alliance, whose members include such insurance heavyweights as Chubb, Marsh and Liberty Mutual, has decided to build its first set of use cases using R3's Corda platform.

With the addition of RiskBlock, R3 now counts all the major insurance blockchain consortia as Corda users, including the Insurwave marine insurance platform created by EY and Maersk as well as regional initiatives in India and Italy.

RiskBlock was officially launched in mid-2017 by The Institutes, an insurance research and education network, but the team behind the DLT consortium has spent at least two years testing enterprise blockchain solutions.

The insurance consortium started to change course this year as it received input from member firms and also some of its potential partners.

The new RiskBlock applications are proofs of insurance; more efficient forms of data sharing when a policyholder first notifies an insurer it will be filing a claim; subrogation, with a focus on blockchain-based net settlement; and parametric insurance, which is paid out automatically when a triggering event such as a natural catastrophe occurs.

"Over the last few months we have seen several insurers migrate to Corda due to its enhanced privacy and scalability; information is shared on a bi-lateral or multi-lateral basis, meaning parties that are not involved in the transaction will not see it," said Ryan Rugg, global head of insurance at R3. "Corda gives insurers the ability to integrate and secure disparate data sources, whilst simultaneously ensuring transparency across an interconnected network of clients, brokers, insurers and other third parties," he added.

In a sense, B3i's switch from Hyperledger to Corda made fellow insurance consortium RiskBlock more likely to settle on the R3 platform as well, all else equal.

That's because, according to Schmid, the potential to "Make interoperability an immediate thing" was a big factor in the platform selection process at RiskBlock.

After re-evaluating our criteria around data privacy, developer productivity and interoperability we concluded that Corda is a perfect fit for our insurance use cases and also for our future strategy for an insurance business network," Markus Tradt, CTO at B3i, told CoinDesk.