In one of our previous episode, Insurwave - a Maersk pilot for marine blockchain insurance, we introduced Insurwave, a new marine blockchain insurance platform launched by EY, Guardtime, Microsoft, Willis Tower Watson, XL Catlin, MS Amlin and ACORD and piloted by Maersk.

This week we are joined by Shaun Crawford, Global Insurance Sector Leader at EY and one of the founders of Insurwave. We will be discussing the complete story of Insurwave, from Proof of Concept to launch.

 

Blockchain in two minutes

A blockchain is a series of blocks of continuous records, where a previous block is effectively a cryptographic copy of the information from the preceding block. The blockchain is managed autonomously using a peer to peer network, meaning that the whole network will know if a peer makes a change to the blockchain. Therefore, everything has to be authenticated. This leads to a live, immutable audit trail.

 

Insurwave

Insurwave is the first product of Insurwave Ltd, a joint venture between EY and Guardtime, a blockchain company whose experience ranges from the NHS to the US Air Force. It is a blockchain platform linking the shipping industry with the brokers, the insurers and reinsurers. At the moment it is focused on providing hull and war cover.

Insurwave is built on the open source version of Corda (See Corda's latest announcement). The reason for this choice is that Corda is a very mature and privacy-focused blockchain. In other blockchains every peer has access to all the data on the blockchain. Insurwave, however, deals with sensitive company information and requires certain data to only be accessible by certain peers, making Corda the best choice.

 

Building Insurwave

Building Insurwave required looking beyond the insurance industry. Guardtime was chosen both for its expertise in blockchain and its range of experience. Gathering a group including shipping, insurance and technology leaders created a team capable of critically examining existing processes to build a new product from the ground up.

The first step in building Insurwave was to create a PoC. This revolved around ten use cases and considered how blockchain can improve efficiency and reduce costs. In doing that, it was always important for Insurwave to be a new proposition, a completely new business model, rather that a digitisation of existing processes. Insurwave has been an opportunity to re-imagine how the underwriting process would be in the future and how claims handling could become more efficient. The end result is that Insurwave can improve cost efficiency by at least 40 per cent.

As the insurance industry isn't particularly known for embracing change, building a completely new platform can be challenging. What made Insurwave feasible was having a small team. Having just one shipping company, one broker, an insurer and a reinsurer ensured that the team could examine all facets of the insurance industry while also remaining flexible.

 

Insurwave's potential

Creating an immutable audit trail and seamlessly sharing data between parties has the potential to improve existing practices in numerous ways.

 

1. Bring risk closer to capital

For shipping companies like Maersk, a major benefit of Insurwave is that it allows them to bring risk closer ...