John Carolin is B3i's new CEO. In this new podcast we had a very honest and open discussion about John's journey to B3i and his assessment of what the company got right, its business model and how they can better engage with brokers. We also discussed the very exciting announcement of the Cat XoL product deployed to customers’ production environments.

 

John Carolin, B3i’s new CEO

John is a chartered accountant and chartered financial analyst by training. He started off working at PWC in the insurance industry. However, John always had a desire to be a maker of things which is why he founded a number of businesses in South Africa including a small venture capital firm, a retail property asset management company and a B2B platform for traditional media and online broadcasters.

John moved to Zurich with his young family to join Antony Elliott at Zurich whom he had worked with 15 years ago. Antony, at that time, was Zurich’s B3i representative and knew of John’s journey and invited him to join B3i to help Zurich further support its investment in B3i and offer him as a resource to the venture. For John working at B3i helped him reconcile his professional training, his industry experience, his business life stage experience and his deep passion for technology and building stuff.

 

What is blockchain?

John thinks of blockchain as a form of DLT mechanism that initially with Bitcoin gave us a way to trust digital data and digital outcomes.

It provided a ledger list of transactions that couldn’t be altered without a huge amount of coordinated effort from a number of parties. This was transformational as traditional databases could have both the data and their audit log altered by a party. Blockchain provided the first mechanism to trust that the data hadn’t be altered.

Blockchain technology matured beyond being just a ledger with the likes of Ethereum providing tamper proof business processes encoded in algorithms. With smart contracts we had mechanisms where we could share automated processes in an immutable manner.

 

What has B3i gotten right and what can they improve on?

For John it is a long list of things that B3i got right and many things they could have done better.

He has looked at the many initiatives over the course of almost three decades within the insurance industry at automating aspects of the value chain, either through commercial entities or non-profit, standard setting bodies, and looked at what they have done well and what they haven't done well or where they haven't delivered on the promise that they brought.

One of the things B3i got right is to address market level inefficiencies. Their ethos of "by the market, for the market" has been very important for them and one of the early things they got right.

Structuring B3i itself is another. They had considered setting themselves up as a foundation that develops open source software. However, the decision to setting up as a for profit company helps create some sort of North Star that helps to clarify your decision making, keeps you honest, and execution focused when you have cooperative competitors that aren’t necessarily aligned.

Moving away from Hyperledger Fabric was a business decision they got right. They felt that Corda answered questions around scalability, data, privacy and security better than Hyperledger Fabric.