Matthias Goessler, CEO of Ritablock and Jean-Pierre Fischer, Markets Director at Ritablock join us in this Insureblocks podcast to discuss their reinsurance accounting blockchain platform called Ritablock and their experience of integrating it into B3i’s recently launched Fluidity Platform.

Matthias has been working in the insurance industry for 25 years and has been Ritablock’s CEO since October 2019.

Jean-Pierre has been working in both the insurance and reinsurance industry for the last 35 years.

 

What is blockchain?

Jean-Pierre defines blockchain from a non-technical standpoint. For him the block is the digital information that can be reinsurance accounting information or claimed information. That block can be stored in a public blockchain or as in the case of Ritablock stored within a private network on a database.

 

Challenges of technical accounting and claims data in the insurance industry

The administration process within the insurance industry has a very high admin costs due to too much paper still being used along with PDFs and unstructured files being exchanged along the value chain.

This creates long processing times along with a lack of transparency, inefficiency and inaccuracy. The slow process leads often to inaccuracy in technical and financial accounting, especially for in-house reinsurance within larger groups.

Whilst there are global standards such as ACORD, their implementation on the primary insurance side is very costly leading to a limited adoption of it. This creates problems for reinsurance companies who don’t always get standardised data from the primary insurer.

Jean-Pierre mentioned that there have been studies that showed that by digitising this process and using standardised data formats would lead to a drop of 30-40% of running these admin processes.

Matthias mentioned that one of Ritablock’s clients mentioned that using their system allowed them to run admin processes that typically would take 2 weeks down to a few seconds.

 

Differences between primary insurer and reinsurer

Jean-Pierre mentioned that the primary insurer isn’t incentivised to send data to a reinsurer in a standardised digital format as the reinsurer will take accounting data in any format today. However, Jean-Pierre believes that as new tech savvy university recruits continue joining primary insurers there will be a push to digitise their processes.

Primary insurers have two issues for sending accounts: (1) they’re not incentivised to implement digital standardised formats and (2) the price of using such standards.

Ritablock’s proposition to primary insurers is for them to send their existing form to Ritablock who will convert it into a digital standardised format when delivering it to the reinsurer. This is done for the primary insurer at a low yearly fee within four digits.

 

Who is Ritablock?

Ritablock was founded in 2019 by Consurance, a consultancy company and Inveos, a software company.

The idea of Ritablock was born over 4 years ago during a project with a client who wanted to build a flexible interface into their system. When starting this project and developing the software they reached a point where it became too complex due to the need to develop too many interfaces for all th...