Susan Joseph has been working in the blockchain area for the past 4 – 5 years. As a lawyer she has consulted with the insurance industry and most recently was the North American representative for B3i, the blockchain for insurance consortium.

In this podcast we discuss two of Susan’s passion: “Innovation and diversity in the insurance industry”.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a foundational technology that provides a highly flexible set of tools allowing businesses, governments and others to re-examine their commercial relationships. It brings opportunities for greatly enhanced efficiency and development of new products. Inherent in the technology is the ability for diverse parties to cooperate in a way where trust is brought about through cryptography or promoting diversity through the development of the technology in the belief that the widest spectrum of perspectives will foster the most valuable innovations.

On a more technical side it is an additional communication layer on the internet / web 3.0. It's based on advanced cryptography, computing and game theory. Susan likes to refer to it as a distributed value technology and for her it presents the next step in the digitization of data - both communications and assets, while the data is created transferred and stored. It has wide-ranging implications for commerce, society and behaviour.

 

Is the insurance industry good at embracing innovation and diversity?

In Susan’s point of view, no the insurance industry isn’t particularly good at embracing innovation and diversity but that isn’t too different to a lot of industries though. Innovation, in the insurance industry, is highly regulated and particularly in the United States where you have 50 state regulations in addition to some federal ones.

Systemically it’s hard to set up innovation in this space and yet you see a demand for digital projects and easier access to products and different kinds of products. Innovation has to happen, or the industry just isn't offering what the market wants.

With regard to diversity that's a problem with every industry - services, technology and insurance. When you look at cutting-edge technology, Susan believes it's even worse. The amount of diversity in a cutting-edge area that just isn’t there. Susan think it is really interesting in that in this technology, such as blockchain, which is intended to democratise, that we need to have this diversity of thought and diversity of voices.

it's not, there's not a full-throated diversity effort let's just put it that way and I think it's really interesting in this technology which is intended to democratize, the more diverse thought and diverse voices in there that needs to happen. Because that's a population that we want to serve.

Diversity is diversity in terms of gender, types of voices, cultural and a lot more. It is an inclusion play. Plenty of studies have shown boars with three or more women really start to affect the culture and change and increased profitability. A set of diverse voices and thoughts will improve the innovation side of any company. It’s really hard to innovate in an echo chamber.

 

In a study by McKinsey in 2017– “Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits.“

 

AM Best – Scoring and assessing innovation