Insureblocks

On the 12th of June 2019, Legal & General launched its Pension Risk Transfer blockchain reinsurance platform called “Estua-re”. Thomas Olunloyo, CEO at the Legal & General Reinsurance Company, based out of Bermuda, joined us in this podcast to share “Estua-re’s background and why blockchain was the best solution to answer his pension reinsurance challenge.

His company is the global reinsurance hub of the Legal & General Group. It writes pension  risk transfer for reinsurance in multiple countries around the world. But focus primarily on the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland and Canada.

 

What is blockchain?

Thomas thinks of blockchain in terms of the context in which they’re applying it with estua-re. Blockchain is a network with a number of participants that are here to sell risk and some who are here to take on risk. It allows these participants to have a single version of the truth built on consensus that exists at all times. For a business, like the Legal & General Reinsurance Company, that trades with contracts that can last up to 50 years if not more, being able to exchange data in an immutable way, built on consensus that is self-perpetuating, is an incredibly powerful thing. Smart contracts are programmable scripts that run on the blockchain that allows for the data to be used for some purpose or another.

 

Legal & General Reinsurance Company

The company does pension risk transfer for reinsurance around the world. What is pension risk transfer? L&G provides insurance to pension schemes either directly or indirectly. Provide a guarantee for the payment of pensions to all members of that scheme. So being a reinsurer, L&G stands behind insurers who provide these guarantees. However, being a reinsurer means L&G take a part of those guarantees to pay those pensions.

 

What was the problem, Estua-re was here to resolve?

Contracts in the pension risk transfer can be up to 50 years old if not more. Every months of those 50 years data is exchanged between L&G reinsurance company and its counterpart. Most of the time that exchange is bilateral but it can also be with a larger number of counterparties. Both parties, or more, are entirely separately exchanging data every month to try and determine how much to pay the individuals within an underline population.

For the duration of those 50 years all the parties are maintaining separate data sets, trying to calculate the same payments from those data sets and exchanging data by emails and data rooms. This is very inefficient. To add to it, any errors which are made are compounded overt time. For example, it can very difficult, if not impossible, to try pinpointing where something has changed and understand what happened 10 years ago, when managing massive data sets comprising tens of thousands of lives.

 

Why blockchain?

Thomas’ journey into solving this problem didn’t start off with blockchain. He had looked at a number of solutions and off the shelf software platforms. But none of them were really able to address the problem they had. Centralised databases with APIs worked well for bilateral business but not as well with multiple parties. Risk is shared among multiple parties. The more parties you have the less efficient it becomes to use centralised databases with APIs. Two years ago Thomas discovered DLT and blockchain which was increasingly gaining momentum and pace in the financial services industry. It then became apparent that blockchain / DLT was the only technology that was able to store data in an immutable way,

Shermin Voshmgir is Director of Cryptoeconomics Research Lab @ Vienna University of Economics and Founder of BlockchainHub which she started nearly 5 years ago. She recently published a book called the “Token Economy”.

In this podcast Shermin is going to take us through what are tokens and the token economy.

When researching blockchain, Shermin quickly realised that blockchain information was spread out on Reddit, Twitter, Ted Talks and numerous other places but there didn’t seem to be this one central repository of information. Shermin launched BlockchainHub to provide a comprenhsive source of information on blockchain.

To find out more about Shermin you can check out her site Shermin.net.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is the driving force of the next generation internet, often referred to as Web 3.0. It’s not a front-end revolution it’s a change around the data structures in the back end of the internet.  Blockchain allows us to have a universal state layer of who did what and who owned what in terms of values or tokens. This is a completely new way of storing and collectively validating data via ledgers which are collective managed by a public or a federate network.

Blockchain is not a financial technology it’s a governance technology.

 

The Book - Token Economy

Shermin recently published her book the “Token Economy”. For her, tokens are the killer application of blockchain and smart contracts.

With the launch of the internet in the late 80s we had the information revolution. However most people couldn’t access the internet because even if they had a computer they did not have the notion of command line to operate the internet to connect to another computer.

However, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext it allowed everyone with even limited computer knowledge to create a visually appealing website, which anyone could now use to navigate the internet with clicking on links.

Tokens are to the Web 3.0 what HTML was to the web. Smart contracts have made it really easy to create a token with a few lines of code. At the beginning of the web a lot of the initial web sets had a “hello world” message and a bunch of links. One of the earliest use case was the search engine. Tokens are at a very similar stage. Whilst it is now very easy to create tokens most people don’t know what to do with tokens.

 

What is a token?

Tokens have been out for a quite a while. Prior to blockchain tokens have had many use cases from their usage at amusement parks, airmiles, gift certificate, a paper note for a fiat currency is a token, a metro / tube ticket is a token, a casino jetton is a token that can be exchanged for cash. Probably the earliest tokens in human history were shells or seeds that were used as a kind of standardised medium of exchange.

A QR code is a kind of computerised token. Cognitive psychology have used tokens. For example in the 50s there were experiments to use incentive mechanism as kind of positive reinforcement tool to change patient behaviour. Good behaviour at the hospital would be rewarded with tokens which could be exchanged for special access rights to the TV room or a special kind of food at the canteen.

Tokens have three components related to them:

In June 2019, the CRO (Chief Risk Officers) Forum, published the “Insurance and distributed ledger technology – a risk manager’s perspective” white paper as a practical tool for risk managers to accelerate the accomplishment of the productive phase of DLT.

For this podcast we are joined by Dr. Sebastian Rath, Principal Risk Officer at NN Group, and with Gian Luca de Marchi, CRO at Unipol Group. Sebastian and Gian Luca aren’t here on behalf of the CRO Forum but are pleased to discuss their views on DLT while sharing some of the CRO Forum DLT paper content.

 

What is blockchain?

A distributed ledger can be considered as a database that is distributed across several independent computing devices where changes to data are protected and manged by cryptography and consensus. This in turn provides guarantees that the data cannot be tampered with and that all parties have identical copies that can be considered as a reliable single source of truth.

The functionality of a distributed ledger system can be enhanced by the use of smart contracts (i.e. computer programs deployed and executed on the ledger’s network) and oracles (i.e. data feeds that trigger specific conditions defined within smart contracts).

 

What is the CRO Forum?

The CRO Forum was formed in 2004 to advance risk management practice in the insurance industry. CRO Forum member companies are large multi-national insurance companies whose members are headquartered across the world with a concentration in Europe.

The CRO Forum has three core aims:

* Championing best practice in risk management to advance business,

* Aligning regulatory requirements with best practice in risk management, and

* Providing insights on emerging and long-term risks.

The CRO Forum aims to share its views on topics related to these aims through publications and papers. In this context, the DLT paper was created by a working group of hands-on risk and technology experts from multiple member companies, including NN Group and Unipol Group.

 

What is a Chief Risk Officer and what are their responsibilities?

Basically a Chief Risk Officer, the CRO, is an executive responsible for identifying, measuring and addressing any material risks that could have an impact on company objectives. Adverse events should be mitigated, while opportunities should be enhanced. According to the Solvency II regulation, when insurance companies calculate their own solvency position through internal models approved by supervisors, CROs are also responsible for the design, implementation and management of these models.

 

The CRO Forum’s white paper on DLT

Hype has surrounded Distributed Ledger Technology and especially blockchain over the last few years since the birth of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Hype, and criticism too, have been fuelled by fervent visions as well as misconceptions. These technologies have not yet delivered on promises, but several experts believe that DLT has the potential to transform the financial services sector. CROs are well positioned to play a critical role and strengthen innovation initiatives; the CRO Forum paper is thus meant as a practical tool for ...

Antony Welfare is the Managing Director of Luxoft, which is part of DXC Technology and has accumulated a wealth of experience on blockchain across industries. He recently published the book Commercializing Blockchain whose content we will be discussing in this podcast. Antony is interested in real blockchain applications and is all about commercializing blockchain - using blockchain in a commercial business or a government to add value efficiency, trust, and a lot more which is discussed in this podcast.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain itself is just a technology. It's just a set of rules and principles that you can put into code. It is an enabler for trust and transparency in any network or business or community, in government, where data and information that's transferred can be more trusted and transparent. Blockchain circumvents all the modern issues we presently have around the reconciliation of data, auditing it and verifying it. Blockchain is fundamentally about trust and transparency.

How does blockchain compare to two companies who have a decade worth of trust in working together and have an API to sharing and exchanging information. Antony would really challenge if two companies, organisations or networks would really trust each other. Each party always reconcile the information they have as they don’t have the exact same copy of the data. At the end of the day the transparency and the trust isn’t there in a technical format. Blockchain is about making the trust and transparency there in a very clear black and white coded manner.

 

Commercializing Blockchain – The Book

Back in 2017, Antony was working with Oracle Corporation and was doing some deep research on blockchain. During his research he realised he wanted to write about real blockchain applications and how the technology could impact individuals, businesses, and government communities. His initial thought was to write a blog to help him in creating material for the keynote speeches. It is at this moment that it dawned on him that there was an opportunity to write a book. Through his contacts from meetups and the feedback he was getting on his book idea he realised that not a single person in the world knows it all on blockchain. He invited 13 contributors to write different sections of the book from how contracts are formulated to global trade issues to consensus mechanism and what the future looks like.

The common and most interesting question he asked all of his contributors is what does blockchain look like in five years time. They all agreed that blockchain is going to be an enabler for us to build solutions to be more efficient to more trusted as a community and that no one will be talking about blockchain just like no one talks about TCP/IP for the web.

 

Killer app of blockchain?

Email is one of the killer apps for the internet. We asked Antony what he thought would be the killer app for blockchain. Antony believes that the killer app is around identity. He believes that there will be an app that will sit on your device (mobile, laptop, etc..) that will hold the identity keys where you share what you want to share with whom you want to share it, what portion of the data and for how long. Essentially, self sovereign identity. Which means that similarly to how you use Google or Facebook but with the difference that you know what’s happened with your data, where is has gone, who has used it and crucially you determine that instead of Google or Facebook. Then tokenization of this data can also all you to get paid for how you wish your data to be...

Heather Dahl is the CEO of Sovrin, one of the leading self-sovereign identity solutions. In this podcast we discuss how identity has evolved from the offline world, to the limitations of it being online in the internet and finally to the opportunities it brings in a blockchain world.

 

What is blockchain?

Heather Dahl looks at blockchain as one of the technologies tools that we have today. From her perspective we should ask ourselves - are you seeking a solution that provides a decentralised network, meaning that you're running a large number of diverse validators or nodes around the world that are run by different organisations that are censorship resistant, that helped build redundancy? Is that something you want that provides governance where no one organisation or company or government runs that network? If that's something you want, blockchain technology brings that decentralised, diverse set of nodes to run a blockchain solution.

From an identity standpoint is do you need interoperability with your identity? If you only need an identity for your sole company’s purposes then you don’t need a blockchain. However, if you’re building an identity, that needs to be interoperable with other systems then you need a blockchain based identity system like Sovrin. This allows issuers to write schemas and credential definitions and revocation on publicly available decentralised global network that everyone can access.

Heather likes to think of blockchain as an immutable ledger where her customers, users or clients are in control of their data and information.

 

 

What is Sovrin?

Heather Dahl is the CEO and Executive Director of the Sovrin Foundation.  ‘Sovrin’ most commonly refers to the Sovrin Network, a public service utility enabling self-sovereign identity on the Internet. The Sovrin Network is decentralized, meaning individuals can collect, hold, and choose which identity credentials —such as a driver’s license or employment credential—without relying on individual siloed databases that manage the access to those credentials.

Sovrin is an open source project that offers the tools and libraries to create private and secure data management solutions that then run on Sovrin’s identity network.

Sovrin is now a global network for decentralised identity in six continents. In the past year they have launched the Sovrin Alliance to provide education and training programme for their community and those interested in decentralised identity. In partnership with Hard Yaka, Sovrin has launched a self sovereign identity incubator out of San Francisco. Sovrin also recently won the award for “Greatest Social Impact” by One World Identity.

You can find out more about Sovrin on their website and join the Sovrin Alliance.

 

The internet has failed in providing an identify solution

The web is abound with news regarding breaches of privacy, personal data being sold, cybercrimes and much more. The common factor around all these issues is identity. Heather believes that we don’t have a data management problem, we have an identity problem as all pieces of data are connected to some form of identity. These issues stem from when the internet was created as a network of machines. The identity protocols weren’t designed for people they were designed to identify machines. Heather gives the example of how email addresses a...

TradeLens is a digital platform that empowers businesses and authorities along the supply chain with a single, secure source of shipping data, enabling more efficient global trade. Join us and Daniel Wilson, director of business development at TradeLens / Maersk and Juan-Jose Ruiz, Head of Strategy & Business Development at TradeLens / IBM to find out more about the exiciting TradeLens platform.

Daniel and Juan are jointly responsible for building out the investment case, as well as overseeing and implementing TradeLens mid to long term strategy, and managing third party engagements.

 

What is blockchain?

Today’s traditional ways of storing data, whether cloud native or locally are great if you're able to trust with absolute surety, that the people and the organisations and the systems managing those data will do so essentially, with impunity. You have no risk that the data stored there and the systems will have any way of being challenged or corrupted.

However, we all know that these systems aren't perfect, and they have limiting features on them. Even systems as secure as banks have billions of dollars stolen from them each year. Because something as simple as hacking in and changing numbers in accounts is something that is feasible, given today's technology.

So basically, what blockchain is, is a way of moving away from the centralization of control and authority. It’s moving away trust from a single body and towards a distributed way of managing that information, and a distributed way of managing trust. Essentially what this means it that everybody within a blockchain network has a stake in the management of the system. Everybody has a way of checking the actions and activities of everybody else.

In an environment like supply chains this is very important as the idea of trusts and systems does not exist today as lots of paper and manual process are still being used in managing trade. What blockchain can enable, amongst other technologies, is a way of distributing digitization across the network, without centralising that control in any one party or body.

 

What is TradeLens?

 

Daniel used an analogy of the airport and planes to describe what is TradeLens. For example when Daniel books a flight to Europe from Newark airport in NY with United Airlines, he might find out that his plane is actually operated by Swiss Air on a different type of airplane leaving from a different terminal. However he can still choose his seat and check in using his United mobile app.

Basically, air travel for passengers is great because you have these all in one solutions in front of you on your phone. Containerized shipping isn't like that. A typical container will have an end to end journey that involves as many as 30 organisations such as the port loading the container on the ship, the shipping line who has the ship, the banks providing financing, government's providing certification and clearance and much more.

In those 30 organisations you’re dealing with at least 100 individuals and more than 200 information exchanges in the process of that container journey.

And today, the best case scenario for most of those information exchanges, is an EDI communication protocol, which is 1970s technology, it's batch processing, it's not particularly resilient. Outside of EDI you’re dealing with emails, phone calls, WhatsApp and texting. But in the majority of cases those information exchanges are being done with a lot of paper and faxing.

TradeLens is trying to address this lack of connectivity in three steps:

Are hybrid blockchains the silver bullet for enterprises wanting to operate in the blockchain world? Join us and Ben Jessel, Head of Growth at Kadena, as we discuss the merits of hybrid blockchains that take on the best of both permissioned and public blockchains.

 

What is blockchain?

A blockchain is a mechanism to have an immutable record. That record can be a record of ownership record or a record of data that can be shared by everyone. It is distributed, which means there's no single owner. Anyone can write to that blockchain and it iss crypto graphically secured, which means that it is tamper proof.

There are two forms of blockchains. Public and private blockchains, which really is a determinant on how the users of a blockchain are permitted to collaborate on that blockchain itself.

 

About Kadena

Kadena is a blockchain organisation whose mission is to be the first blockchain there's actually ready for business.

Will Martino and Stuart Popejoy are the co-founders of Kadena. Will Martino played a pivotal role in the setup of the securities exchange commissionthat started to oversee aspects of blockchain and then he went to work at JP Morgan Labs. Within that role Will and Stuart interviewed a whole range of stakeholders in 2014 and came to the conclusion that blockchain technology wasn’t ready for prime time utilisation by JP Morgan or any tier one financial institution in terms of speed, security, and scalability.

Will and Stuart used the results of their investigation to build a reference blockchain which ultimately laid the foundations for Quorumand for the launch of the JP Morgan Coina few years later. Will and Stuart left JP Morgan with the open source reference permissioned based blockchain to start Kadena. Now they’re getting ready to launch the public version of this blockchain on the 30thof October thus giving them these two platforms, a public blockchain and a private blockchain, which speak the same language around their smart contract language.

 

Differences between public and private blockchain

What fundamentally differentiates a public and a private blockchain is around who has access to the blockchain and the actions they are allowed to perform. A public blockchain, like Bitcoin, is available to everyone and a new user is able participate in the consensus purely by downloading a wallet and submitting a transaction. As the users are anonymous there are very low levels of trust. The way public blockchains enable transactions to complete without any of that trust, is through mathematics. Its consensus capability is a an incentive model, that de-incentivizes unruly actors by making it very expensive to subvert the blockchain.

In the case of Bitcoin you have proof of work which requires the need to solve a computationally intense mathematical problem, that would cost a lot of money to complete.

Now, as each block is added in compounds the difficulty. So while it may be a little difficult to subvert the most recent block, to subvert one that is 10 blocks behind, you not only have to subvert that block, you have to rewrite history for all the corresponding blocks that come afterwards, which means that they are linked together using this mathematical equation, which is very time and resource intensive. And that becomes incrementally harder over time.

Proof of stake, has a slightly different incentive model, which is about staking money that you could lose i...

Defining and understanding what is blockchain is a difficult task in itself. Michel Rauchs published a white paper entitled “Distributed Ledger Technology Systems – A Conceptual Framework” whilst he was at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. to help clarify all the concepts in DLT systems and to provide a framework in understanding those systems.

 

About Michel Rauchs

Michel got interested in Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies about 5 years ago and then decided to write a master thesis about the evolution of the Bitcoin business ecosystem. For his thesis he monitored the evolution of this ecosystem by taking a data set of 500 different companies, projects and organisations over a 5 year period.

Joined the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance to work full time as a researcher of the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. He has now recently left the Cambridge Centre to set himself up as an independent consultant at Paradigma.

 

 

What is blockchain?

Michel concedes that answering this question could take a whole day. But for him a blockchain, or a DLT system as he prefers to call it, is essentially just a shared record keeping system that is collectively maintained and updated by multiple participants that may not necessarily trust each other. Participants are able to reach an agreement over shared set of data and its validity without the need for a central coordinator or central administrator.

With regards to differentiating the differences between DLT and blockchain it is very difficult as the terminology is very unclear, messy and fuzzy. At the moment they’re both used as umbrella terms for a wide array of different concepts and technologies.

 

Publishing the white paper “Distributed Ledger Technology Systems – A Conceptual Framework”

Michel had two objectives in publishing the white paper: “Distributed Ledger Technology Systems – A Conceptual Framework”:

* Clarify all the concepts that have been conflated together

* Provide a framework to divide the system into different parts, components and processes. To compare different systems together by analysing how different design configurations and decisions essentially impact the characteristics and properties of the systems

 

Public vs private blockchains and distributed systems.

The difference between DLT systems and other distributed systems, are that in traditional distributed systems you have distributed storage, processing power across multiple connected devices but connected by one entity to achieve fault tolerance. So, if one of these components or devices goes down, that the system as a whole still continues to function.

In DLT systems, it's really about what is called Byzantine fault tolerance. So not only being able to cope with hardware failures but also with tolerating with the presence of potentially malicious actors that want to actively try to undermine or disrupt the network.

In public blockchains you have dynamic membership systems where anyone can join a network and leave the network at any point of time. It essentially means that we do not know at any point in time, how many actors on the system, and actually who they are.

Now, in private blockchains, it's a bit different, because we have restricted access to a limited number of participants. A fixed membership system.

Dr. Marcus Schmalbach is the CEO and co-founder of Ryskex, a provider of a blockchain-based ecosystem for alternative risk transfers and innovative insurance solutions. In this podcast we discuss Risk Transfer 2.0 from a perspective of how to use blockchain and AI solutions for new and emerging risks.

 

What is blockchain?

Candidly, Marcus, Googled what is blockchain to get the following definition: “a decentralised distributed and public digital ledger that is use to record transactions across many computers”. However from his personal point of view, blockchain is an upcoming and interesting technology for the insurance market that will have a great impact on that industry.

 

What is Ryskex and what is its vision?

Ryskex stands for risk exchange. It offers a hedging platform focusing on emergent and non-insurable risk in a b2b ecosystem.

They bring together risk managers of traditional insurance companies or captive owning companies and institutional investors who have a risk appetite. Ryskex uses both blockchain, a private version of Ethereum, and AI technology in running its platform.

 

What is Risk Transfer 2.0?

Risk Transfer 2.0 is fundamentally two points:

* Covering risks in innovative ways such as the use of parametric based solutions

* Covering new upcoming risks like globalisation and ones engendered by digitisations such as cyber risks

Cyber insurance for example is very difficult to price and to understand the real risks associated to cyber. As it’s a relatively new risk there isn’t sufficient data on the kind of exposures that could happen that weren’t conceived of. New solutions have to be designed based on this limited set of data. However Cyber risk is only one example of such new risks, we have reputational risk and especially climate change risk that can have a large impact on the corporate risk landscape. All of these new emerging risks cannot be tackled using traditional approaches and thus require new solutions.

 

What role does data play?

The question thus comes to mind is that does the data exist or are insurance companies simply not capturing the right kind of data? Marcus agrees that the data is existing but isn’t necessarily being captured by insurance companies.

Parametric insurance has a trigger that initiates a claim process. Having the right data to act as the trigger is critical. Ryskex works with insurance companies to help determine what is the right trigger for a parametric insurance. In the case of cyber insurance a trigger can be agreed between the policy owner and the risk taker. For example a double trigger model can be used when there is a data breach (1st trigger), which when reported by the press will ultimately lead to a fall in their share price (2nd trigger).

Ryskex is working with some syndicates in the London market to design these kinds of solutions over the next few months and offer them in a parametric solution.

 

New risks require new infrastructures

Marcus recognises that there is a lot of scepticism in the insurance industry with regards to both AI and blockchain technology. However, in addition to the recognised benefits that blockchain can bring, Marcus believes that blockchain helps to make claim adjustments and parametric payments a lot more cost effective. The AI component will have a large impact on the underwriting or the risk and its pricing.

 

PRICE (political sanctions, reputation damage, innovation failure, cyber-attacks and equity) model

At the moment there are risk which are hard to cover or who are insurable on the market.

Dustin Helland is blockchain product strategy and implementation manager at State Farm. In this exciting episode he talks to us about the auto claims subrogation implementation on blockchain by State Farm and USAA. What is interesting about this implementation is that it was done on a Quorum blockchain, which is a first on Insureblocks.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which enables members of a business network to execute transactions in a peer to peer fashion.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) essentially means that each of the network participants has a copy of the shared information. And by leveraging some complicated mathematical algorithms, the blockchain technology ensures that each of the participants can trust that the copy they have, or have access to, is the same as all the others.

What this means is that when each of the participants can trust the information that they have, it allows them to perform business transactions in a peer to peer fashion. Rather than depending upon a third party or intermediary for validating that the information is actually correct.

 

Who is State Farm?

State Farm was founded in 1922 by retired farmer and insurance salesman George Jacob "G.J." Mecherle. State Farm now insures more cars and homes than any other insurer in the United States while also providing a few other products such as life insurance, ifnanical services and a litany of others. As a mutual company, State Farms is focused on their policyholders and is currently ranked number 36 on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies.

 

State Farm’s blockchain journey

State Farm’s blockchain journey started in late 2016 when Bitcoin started to get on the attention radar of financial institutions and other large enterprises.

State Farm established a group in their labs department to explore and priorities blockchain opportunities. The team initially focused on working across the multiple business lines such as the claims department, underwriting and financial services. The objective was to educate them on the capabilities of the technology and identify and evaluate possible blockchain use cases that State Farm thought could be of value. In the spirit of learning by doing, they aligned a few of the identified business opportunities with some development teams to create early prototypes.

Since then their work has evolved towards a focus on product delivery and realisation of business value. The current flagship project is the net subrogation product that they have built in collaboration with USAA (United Services Automobile Association).

 

Large consortium approach or co-founder one for blockchain?

State Farm rapidly realised that blockchain is a team sport. For many of the blockchain use cases, to realise the potential of that use case requires a certain level of market adoption. The value is typically in the network.

There are a couple of emerging patterns for driving blockchain solutions from concept through development and industry adoption. State Farm has invested and participated in each to really understand them. One of those models is the co-founder based approach that typically involves a small number of firms or companies that focus on developing a single product or use case. They build it out, prove it out and invite others to join in.

The other model is the consortium approach such as RiskStream Collaborative (previously known as the RiskBlock...