The Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i) is gearing up for its annual get together in Monte Carlo on Monday. One of the topics that they plan to discuss is the company’s move into Commercial insurance, its second line of business. The first project was a reinsurance contract for Excess of Loss (XOL).
They chose XOL as the first project because of its relative simplicity. The plan is to go into production for the renewal cycles in the new year. They’ve just started an early movers program of a dozen companies who will be the first to action the renewals on the B3i platform.
Commercial insurance
Antonio Di Marzo joined B3i from Generali as Product Owner for Commercial Insurance. He’s currently working on standardization, integration, and automation.
This week CMO Ken Marke conducted a podcast interview with Di Marzo. A lot of the discussion was about mindset. He said: “what you need is the industry mindset to shift in order to adopt the technology and execute the transformation.”
Di Marzo also spoke about the privacy aspects: “It creates peace of mind in terms of I can share my data. I can work on a peer-to-peer infrastructure. But still my data is private. It is giving me the peace of mind that my data is not going to be published.”
Di Marzo highlighted the need to share data in a more controlled way. He pointed to the use of email which is relatively uncontrolled. And in the London market, people walk around with large files of documents to share.
Both Marke and Di Marzo acknowledged that the current industry functions just fine, so why is there the need to change the status quo? The primary driver is clients and how they’re engaging in the market. The demand for insurance is widening. And clients want things faster, higher quality, and more certainty from their coverage.
No doubt more will be revealed at the Monte Carlo gathering. Apart from progress in execution and commercial insurance, topics for discussion include the move to R3’s Corda technology, the opening of the US office, and the soon-to-launch membership program.
