Insurance industry uses blockchain to connect via the cloud

The creation of an ever-more standardised blockchain framework represents a key moment for the evolution of blockchain technology and the insurtech sector more widely.

That is according to Christopher McDaniel, president of The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative, an industry-led consortium collaborating to unlock the potential of blockchain across the insurance sector.

McDaniel said that when blockchain first emerged the space became quickly crowded, with numerous companies developing blockchain technology but working in silos.

RiskStream has been driving the creation of a standardised platform, called Canopy, which he describes as the industry’s first end-to-end reusable blockchain framework.

It allows multiple applications to use the framework, “so that users don’t have to reinvent the wheel”.

The framework connects to the back office of insurance carriers, so it acts as a bridge between carriers as well as brokers and reinsurers using blockchain.

“We’re up to version 2.6 of Canopy, as of September, and we had our first production-testing with a global broker, a global carrier and a US-based carrier where we were able to production-test Canopy with our first notice of loss in personal auto use case,” McDaniel told APCIA Today.

“This was ground-breaking we tested Canopy in a real production environment for the first time with multiple cloud environments, one of the things that is essential to Canopy.

“We were able to get everything to connect even on different cloud environments their blockchain nodes were able to connect and talk to each other properly.

“That was a big deal no-one I know of had been able to do cloud-to-cloud blockchain before, but we were able to do it through Canopy with that testing.”

McDaniel added that RiskStream has two cases that are production-ready, the first notice of loss that its members were testing and a personal auto proof of insurance. RiskStream is going to have a second round of production-testing before the end of the year.

“We’re very excited about the production-testing and all that we’re doing,” he concluded.