Today The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative announced its working on a blockchain proof of insurance verification tool with Liberty Mutual, Nationwide and other consortium members. Consider how construction companies or contractors are required to show they have insurance cover and the need to verify the coverage is up-to-date.
Insurtech startup Trustlayer is a partner in the project providing robotic process automation to digitize the insurance certificate data in a standardized way. In April last year, Trustlayer won The Institutes Insurtech award for its work on certificates of insurance (COI). It also won a similar award from enterprise blockchain firm R3 in late 2019.
The Proof of Concept (PoC) follows earlier work on COI as part of RiskStream Labs, which also included the Blockchain for Energy consortium (formerly OOC) during the exploratory phase. Since then the requirements have been more clearly defined.
“One of the main reasons we joined the consortium was to support its effort to solve key business challenges, including this one faced by all industries: quickly and accurately verifying insurance coverage,” said Brendan Smyth, Liberty Mutual Product Manager for Global Innovation. “Resolving this long-standing issue would add tremendous value to insurance brokers, buyers, providers, lenders, vendors and a host of others.”
Rather than merely verifying a static document, the significant piece of work is digitizing the certificate of insurance. In commercial insurance, sometimes different insurers provide coverage for particular insurance clauses. Trustlayer’s solution helps to digitize all the data using Accord standards and pull it all together in one place. One of the risks with a paper certificate of insurance (COI) is that the policy might have lapsed or changed. The RiskStream solution aims to provide real-time verification of the current state of insurance.
In early 2019, Marsh rolled out its own commercial proof of insurance application, which is also enabled for gig workers.
Until recently, much of RiskStream’s work was on personal lines. In December, the consortium unveiled it was working on its first commercial insurance solution for Surety Bonds for government and construction contractors. It also has a use case for underwriting workers’ compensation.
RiskStream has yet to launch its first application into production, the First Notice of Loss for auto insurance, which is expected to go live in the second half of 2021.
