In this exciting podcast, our 50th, we had the great pleasure of having Magda Ramada Sarasola, EMEA Insurtech Innovation Leader, at Willis Towers Watson return to Insureblocks. In this fireside chat we discussed the emergence of a new stack – the convergence of blockchain, AI, IoT, big data, machine learning and robotics.

This podcast sits at the epicentre of a pivot we’re doing at Insureblocks for 2019. In addition to reporting stories on blockchain within the insurance industry, Insureblocks is going to embrace three new themes:

* Cover new industries: finance, supply chain logistics, food and agriculture, automobile and transportation, and healthcare. The aim is to investigate their blockchain learnings and facilitate the sharing of best practice across industries

* Investigate how blockchain sits with this new technology stack that includes AI, IoT, machine learning, big data, and robotics. We believe  that while they’re noteworthy the potential these technologies have individually is limited but once combined as a stack there is the “multiplier” effect to their potential

* Deep dive into the legal and regulatory blockchain environment and of course best practices for establishing effective governance within blockchain networks

 

What is Blockchain?

In the initial days blockchain was often referred to as a shared excel database. Of course, now we know that blockchain is a lot more than that. Today blockchain can be looked as this ledger that participants who don’t know each other and don’t necessarily trust each other can transact without the need for an overseeing central actor. Transactions of value can be:

* Exchanged without being corrupted or changed

* Validating their authenticity and confirm that whoever is sending the value actually owns it

Consequently for Magda, blockchain is a sociological innovation. It enables peer-to-peer markets to work without centralised authorities. This has impact not just onto the peer-to-peer world but also onto the enterprise and business world whose ecosystems are highly dysfunctional. It gives enterprises peer-to-peer enablement which makes blockchain so interesting.

It’s a new governance paradigm that changes the way we organise markets and transactions of value in the broadest sense of the word (i.e. digital and physical assets).

 

Data the lifeblood of insurance

August last year, Insureblocks interviewed Bill Pieroni, CEO of ACORD– (Ep. 21 ACORD: data standards for blockchain in insurance) where he stated “Data is the lifeblood of the insurance industry, which fundamentally works by examining data to quantify risk”.  Over the last few years the nature, type and amount of data that is becoming available to the insurance industry has radically changed. Sandip Patel, Global Managing Director for insurance from IBM, stated that on Insureblocks that “Data is the new natural resource” and he mentioned three important points:

* Volume of data is changing – 2.5 quintillion (a thousand raised to the power of six {1018}) bytes of data is produced on a daily basis (as reported by ...