Today Accenture and Generali Employee Benefits (GEB) announced the launch of a new blockchain-based reinsurance service for captives. Big companies often provide group insurance services for their global subsidiaries via captives. It enables groups to pool the risk internally, but there’s still a need to offload at least part of the risk to reinsurers.
By using blockchain, the data can be shared with external insurers and reinsurers which saves time and reduces processing errors. It also enables automatic reconciliation. The employee benefits enabled through the Generali system includes life, disability, accident and healthcare insurance.
Last year a successful prototype was run with agricultural company Syngenta and another multinational and included local insurers in Spain, Switzerland and Serbia.
Generali previously highlighted the challenge of applying blockchain to employee benefits because of the lack of standards in comparison to property and casualty insurance. However, it believes it has managed to enable genuine integration of systems.
“The use of blockchain technology allows for a truly connected ecosystem and a seamless partnership between clients, advisers, local insurers and Generali. Blockchain will change not only our Network but the employee benefits industry as we know it,” said Sergio Di Caro, GEB’s CEO.
The blockchain enables different players to exchange employee benefits risks. “We work across borders and we’re in the business of collecting, validating, aggregating data in a way that serves the client,” said Fabiano Rossetto, GEB Chief Product Officer. “Our ecosystem encompasses local partner insurers and clients and every relationship is managed by a contractual agreement, which is the reinsurance treaty.”
Those reinsurance treaties have been converted into smart contracts.
“This technology enables the stakeholders of the reinsurance to captive process to share and synchronise both contractual agreements (reinsurance and cession treaties translated into “Smart Contracts”) and underlying data without establishment of a centralised platform and database, keeping data ownership at local level,” commented GEB COO
Andrea Pontoni last year.
The solution uses R3’s Corda enterprise blockchain technology which was adopted by the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i), the RiskBlock Alliance and several other insurance sector players.
GEB says the Generali Group supports the solution and it’s inspired by B3i. Generali is one of 15 shareholders in B3i which recently raised additional funding. Given B3i has to focus on solutions for all its members it’s not surprising that some members will create initiatives outside of B3i.
On June 18-19 2019 Hanson Wade is running the Blockchain for Insurance conference in London. Ledger Insights is a media partner.
Update: Confirmation that the technology is R3 Corda was added
