The Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i) has announced that 30 reinsurance contracts have now been concluded on its platform, with participants including Allianz Re and Generali.
A total of 9 insurers, 4 major brokerage firms, and 8 reinsurers participated in the placements, which were conducted as a parallel run with the 1 January 2020 renewals or as a re-creation.
This appears to suggest that none of the contracts were actual live placements, and may have been backfilled into B3i after the fact.
The transactions were conducted in B3i’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) application, which also provides third parties with the option to build their own applications atop it.
B3i opted to switch away from using blockchain back in 2018, choosing instead to utilise Corda, an open source DLT product created by New York-headquartered technology firm R3.
“B3i’s platform shows what’s possible for greatly easing the placement process for all parties involved, and it’s very promising,” said Silvio Tschudi, Senior Retrocession Manager at Allianz Re.
“Working with our brokers and reinsurers during the placement process, across the B3i platform, has shown improved efficiencies and complete contract certainty,” he added.
Alberto Valenti, Head of Group Reinsurance at Generali, also commented: “Our company has tested the potential of B3i’s application recreating the placement of the Group Cat programme after the end of the 2020 renewal.”
“Generali has extended the parallel run also to 2 selected intra-group reinsurance Cat programmes observing several potential benefits in adopting the application for the intra-group transactions. Our main brokers and reinsurers have been involved.”
In 2020, B3i intends to continue to develop its reinsurance platform to include additional types of reinsurance and modules for technical accounting and claims, while also expanding into large commercial applications.
The Initiative is entirely owned by members of the re/insurance industry, and currently has 20 shareholders from Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa.
“The reinsurance transactions show that distributed ledger technology will be a powerful solution for insurers, brokers, and reinsurers to grow their business while creating material efficiencies over existing technology. B3i offers the only DLT-based solution in production and capable of handling reinsurance placements today,” said John Carolin, CEO of B3i.
He continued: “We invite all participants in the insurance industry to work with B3i to improve risk transfer using distributed ledger technology – whether by investing and joining our governance, by using the platform for transactions, or by partnering to develop new solutions.”
B3i’s Chairman, Antony Elliot, further stated: “B3i has always been by the industry, for the industry. Our global shareholders and B3i’s talented team have built the only application that uses distributed ledger technology to facilitate reinsurance placements.”
“B3i looks forward to expanding our engagement with insurers, brokers, and reinsurers to develop the platform’s capabilities further considering reinsurance and commercial insurance use cases.”
