Insureblocks Blockchain & Smart Contracts In Insurance

Michele Curtoni heads the strategy and new business development at SDX, SIX’s regulated digital asset exchange platform, which is part of the SIX Financial Group, the financial market infrastructure of Switzerland. In this podcast we discuss a wide range of topics from wholesale CBDC projects, cryptocurrencies and a lot more from the optic of a regulated digital asset platform. What is blockchain? The first time Michele was explained what is blockchain was in 2014/15. At that time it was described to him as an append only data structure. It's an Excel where you never can delete a row, you can only add them, but you can look up whatever you wrote before and what other people wrote before it. It has a chatter effect where you have to validate what is heard by the participants in a “room”. In terms of how it applies to the financial industries, it comes down to the ledger, the compression of the ledger, intermediaries and malicious actors onto a network and how the validation of the blocks would work. SIX and

Iota Nassr is a policy analyst at the OECD within the financial markets division. She currently manages the FinTech experts group of the OECD Committee on Financial Markets, leading the analysis around anything that has to do with digitalization of finance. The OECD Report “Why decentralised finance matters and the policy implications” is product of the committee’s expert group composed of representatives of the 38 OECD members coming from Central Banks, Ministry of Finance and other financial authorities.   What is blockchain? Iota’s definition of blockchain hasn’t changed much since her previous podcast on Insureblocks on “Tokenisation of Assets and Potential Implications for Financial Markets – OECD Report” on the 13th of June 2021. She still sees blockchain and DLT, more broadly, as a way to record, share information and to exchange value in a decentralised manner without the need for trusted central authorities or intermediaries. However now she believes the emphasis is now more on the programmable nat

In 2016, Etherisc was one of the first companies to launch a real world use case for a flight delay insurance policy on a public blockchain. Regulatory and lack of stable coin hindered that early solution. In 2017, they relaunched along with an insurance partner but still had challenges. In today’s podcast, Christoph Mussenbrock – CEO & Founder of Etherisc shares with us what they have learned since 2016 and why their 2022 launch is going to win.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a technology which allows you to keep a distributer ledger of transactions. It comes in two flavour as either a public or private blockchain. In a public blockchain, all participants can validate transactions independently thus creating a new level of trust. Some of these public blockchain such as Ethereum offer programmable computing, which enables the running of programs such as smart contracts. Smart contracts can be used to programme a complete insurance business process on top of blockchain which is what Etherisc is doing.  

In this podcast we had the pleasure of having Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute and John Reynolds, COO and founder of Coadjute return to Insureblocks to share with us the launch of their real estate blockchain platform and their thoughts on a mortgage stablecoin.   What is blockchain? Dan’s definition of blockchain: In our previous podcast, Dan had used the glass box theory as an analogy to explain what is blockchain. For this podcast he uses a football match. In the old days before live TV existed, you had to rely on a newspaper reporter or a friend at a pub explaining to you what happened in a match that you had missed. In that scenario you have to rely and trust somebody else to share that information accurately and reliably to you. What blockchain does to the property market is that it introduces the possibility of live TV where you can form your own opinion as to what happened as can everybody else. Blockchain brings that sense of all its participants having the information for themselves without having to r

Todd McDonald is the co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at R3. In this podcast we discuss R3’s Product Vision and their views on market trends, market needs and R3’s long term product investment.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a way for multiple participants to join a network and update the state of that network without having to trust someone to coordinate amongst them. For businesses, Todd sees blockchain as a way to connect with more customers and more businesses without having to worry as much around the trust factor.   Three market trends Back in September of this year Todd presented at CordaCon a presentation entitled “R3 Product Vision: Market Trends, Market Needs and R3’s Long-Term Product Investment.”In it he started by analysing three market trends: “Everything is an asset”, “push-pull of (de)centralisation” “Plan ahead for regulation”.   Everything is an asset Blockchain has the ability to create digital scarcity. Essentially anything that you can prove ownership of can become an as

Over the last 12 months Decentralised Finance also known as DeFi has really exploded with reported total value locked reaching $250bn.  R3 who operates in the permissioned blockchain space is spinning out Obscuro into the permissionless space of DeFi. In this podcast we’re joined by James Carlyle who explains the DeFi landscape, the challenges it faces in terms of privacy and scalability and how Obscuro can address these.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed databased. Instead of one party running it, it is run as a network by a group of entities who don’t necessarily trust each other. It contains features that ensure that entities don’t need to trust each other, they can trust the infrastructure and the code itself. James has been on a blockchain journey since 2015 when he started off with permissionless public systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum prior to joining R3 in 2015 and helping to design Corda. Corda though had a very different principles than permissionless public systems as it was desi

Tim Nelson is the CEO of Hope for Justice and is part of the founding board of the charity which exists to try and end all forms of human trafficking and modern slavery across the globe. They work alongside major multinational businesses through an organisation called the Slave Free Alliance that they set up a few years ago.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed database that is shared between the nodes of computer. It stores information electronically in a digital format. It maintains a secure and decentralised record of transactions and what differentiates it to other databases is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record. This generates trust without the need of a third party.   Modern Slavery According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) there are 40.3 million people in forced labour, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, organ harvesting and forced marriage worldwide: Including 24.9 million in forced labour and 4 million in forced marriage. It means there a

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are increasingly being talked about in the press with announcements of initiatives from different central banks working on CBDCs coming out left right and centre. Few however are as forward thinking and embracing a collaborative approach as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). For this podcast we are joined by Daniel Eidan,  Adviser and Solution Architect at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the Innovation Hub where he builds technology solutions for the central banking community with a special focus on blockchain and CBDC. He will share with us some of the exciting work his team are doing for driving CBDC forward.   What is blockchain? Blockchain and DLT is often referred to as Web 3.0 whilst the internet of today is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 enables to globally connect communications protocol whilst blockchain and Web 3.0 isn’t just about putting communication protocols digitally but to store value digitally. What blockchain enables is to execute compu

Leandro Nunes, Vice President, Product Development and Innovation at Mastercard, joins us to share how he leveraged Mastercard’s DNA in scalability, payment automation and governance. We also discuss the important of a data governance model and his top tips for building scalable blockchain solutions.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that uses a consensus methodology to immutably record blocks in sequence in a ledger. It’s a technology that is driven by data governance. The governance is on the data side not necessarily on the blockchain. Data governance looks at the question of ownership of the data, who has visibility over it and the rights for sharing it. It allows for the creation of networks to tackle use cases where the participants can integrate their systems in a decentralised environment where they can share the data. This provides the visibility to increase the trust between the participants. Leandro also stresses what blockchain is not. It’s not the saviou

Alisa DiCaprio, is the Head of Trade and Supply Chain at R3 and also facilitates a lot of R3’s research. Whilst the concept of governance is familiar to many in the business community it has proven to be quite a challenge to blockchain business networks. In this podcast we discuss with Alisa, her latest research paper on the future of enterprise blockchain governance and collaboration. We cover some of the design and implementation of new business and technical models that will ensure that your blockchain journey is a success.   What is blockchain? For Alisa, blockchain is just a database but what makes it different from other databases is that it’s decentralised that is global accessible. Like other digital technologies, blockchain requires the same adjustments to the global and commercial infrastructure.   Discussing the future of governance and collaboration In July 2021, Alisa published a white paper entitled “The Future of Governance and Collaboration”.  R3 began itself as a banking consortium and thus

IDunion is a new European decentralised identity management platform that is promising to bring user centric digital identity with privacy at its core. In this podcast we had Adrian Doerk – Product manager at Lissi and communication & Public relations at IDunion, walk us through IDunion.   What is blockchain? For Adrian, blockchain is just a data structure. When you expand its definition from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective with multiple nodes on a network what makes it interesting is whether the rights to writing on the network are permissioned or permissionless. This is determined by the type of consensus that exists on the network who determines who and what is written into the network.   Present challenges with digital identity History of the digital identity on the internet: Isolated siloed identity where users would login and authenticate themselves with the provider of a digital identity for accessing a service Federate identity where multiple companies and institutions got tog

Jim Nasr, is the CEO of Acoer, a software development company whose vision, and work is all about building useful, usable, real time technologies that are fundamentally targeted at the healthcare industry. Jim was the former chief software architect at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States. In this podcast we discuss how NFTs and blockchain can be used to empower individual’s consent.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a public infrastructure that should be used within the public context. Blockchain provides transparency, auditability and accountability. Blockchain is a layer of trust that can be used to impute trust between parties who don’t trust each other. Jim is keen for blockchain to move past the world of cryptocurrencies and proof of concepts. He wants to make blockchain as practical as possible with real practical solutions.   Challenges of consent Consent is an element of compliance. In the healthcare industry, when you go see your GP, you fill out paperwork t

In January 2020, 12 global pharmaceutical companies and 17 public and private entities; including technical, legal, regulatory, academia, research organisations and patient representative organisations, got together to form PharmaLedger, the pharmaceutical blockchain consortium. Joining us for this podcast is Daniel Fritz, PharmaLedger Industry Project Leader and Supply Chain Domain Architect at Novartis and Marco Cuomo, Manager Applied Technology Innovation at Novartis, a team that brings in new technologies, such as blockchain, into Novartis. Marco is also the co-lead architect at PharmaLedger for the blockchain platform.   What is blockchain? Daniel likes to introduce blockchain with the five A’s: Assets, too often blockchain is associated with cryptocurrencies as assets but assets can also be data and medicinal products that can be exchanged on a distributed ledger technology Audit, the immutability aspect of blockchain is good for audit. Automation, use of smart contracts eliminate non-value ad

Arnoud Star Busmann, CEO of MineHub and Carl Wegner, CEO of Contour join us in this exciting podcast to discuss their cross blockchain ecosystem collaboration. Arnoud and Carl share their insights on how to identify opportunities for cross ecosystem collaboration based on customer overlaps and data to ultimately build an experience that will delight the customer.   What is blockchain? Carl’s definition of blockchain, within the context of distributed ledger technology, is a way of managing multiple databases and keeping that data where they overlap is in sync. You have a set of consensus mechanisms to manage agreements between the multiple databases, a communications protocol and a rules-based system for them to work. Arnould’s definition of blockchain is one of a data infrastructure that provides a shared single source of truth that is distributed across an ecosystem. The responsibility for maintaining the shared truth maintained by a neutral, unbiased machine or machines. The data is owned by the data own

Asset tokenisation has become one of the most prominent use-cases of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in financial markets, for assets including securities, commodities and other non-financial assets. For this podcast we had Iota Nassr, Economist and Policy Analyst at the OECD, join us to discuss her recent OECD report on the tokenisation of assets and their potential implications for financial markets. Iota started working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and at Citigroup before joining the OECD for the last 9 years working for the committee on financial markets. The committee has set up an expert group on financial digitalisation which includes representatives of central banks, finance ministries, treasuries and other financial authorities from the 38 OECD members. The group looks into Fintech related matters in financial markets and their policy implications including the area of blockchain in finance.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology, that records

Harry Behrens – bloXmove co-founder. Harry was until recently the Head of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory where they built a mobility blockchain platform. Harry describes himself as a software guy. Now, along with his co-founder Sophia Rodiger, he has performed a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform which is the core of what bloXmove will be bringing to the market. In this podcast we discuss how bloXmove will enable building an open mobility ecosystem.   What is blockchain? Harry defines distributed ledger technology (DLT) as way for independent parties to keep a shared set of truthful facts of transactions they conduct amongst each other. It is a peer to peer system that facilitates trusted transactions between trustless parties, where they can trust the distributed ledger to reflect the reality of the business relationships between them.   From Daimler Mobility Blockchain to bloxMove One of the many uniqueness of this startup is that of the four founders, two of them are

Souleima Baddi is the CEO of Komgo, an innovative platform that powers trade networks. In this podcast we discussed the challenges of bringing blockchain to the trade finance industry. Souleima shared her insights on how to manage the need to bring user value immediately whilst dealing with both tech and user issues for adopting blockchain. How do you manage IT and security departments conventional ways of vetting a new platform whilst gaining the trust of traders accustomed to using email and paper processes for the last decades? Souleima is a banker, having spent 18 years with Société Générale, of which the last 10 years were in Geneva launching their commodity finance business. She’s also a passionate mum of three kids.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger. It is a shared and synchronised database across multiple participants, that enables the recording of interactions and transfer of information, such as identity or values like money and securities, between two parties without the ne

Chaim Finizola is the ClaimShare Director and the head of business development for emerging markets over at IntellectEU. In this podcast we discuss ClaimShare’s confidential computing solution built on top of R3’s Conclave and Corda Enterprise platform for the detection and prevention of “double dipping” fraud in the insurance industry which runs in the several billions of dollars each year.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a technology that allows different actors to collaborate with each other without having to trust each other. Having a database in the form of a distributed ledger you can have not only the data decentralised, but also the way the data is handled in a decentralised manner. Independent of the discussion of centralised versus decentralised, Chaim reminds us what is important is to focus on the business use case and then determine the best approach.   What is confidential computing Confidential computing allows different actors to perform private computations on specific data sets and pr

Charles Kerrigan – Partner & Global Head of Fintech at CMS. Charles spends his time looking at what do new technologies mean for the industries that their clients work in from financial institutions to fintechs, crypto firms, and blockchain protocols. In this podcast we take a comprehensive look at NFTs and their impact on the financial industry, on property, transferability and ownership within legal frameworks.   What is blockchain? Charles gives us a lawyer’s definition, where he sees blockchain as both a puzzle and a challenge. To explain that he gave us an example, where is cryptocurrency property as defined under a legal system in English law. Property can be categorised into two buckets: Real property, is tangible and is something that can be touched. Intangible property: Shows in action, is essentially everything else where you can bring an action in relation to it, i.e. that you can sue in court for it. When Bitcoin arrived, it wasn’t something that can be touched and thus could be considered

Joan Zerkovich – Senior Vice President, Operations at AAIS (American Association of Insurance Services) and Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger at the Linux Foundation join us to announce that the AAIS' OpenIDL is joining the Linux Foundation. In this episode we get an introduction to the AAIS, OpenIDL, the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger. We also discussed how OpenIDL will leverage the Linux Foundation unique approach to governance.   What is blockchain? Joan: distributed ledger technology is a technology that provides a way to have immutable records in the digital world, in a networked environment. Blockchain is used in a number of ways in addition to cryptocurrency, such as for business applications that require data security, privacy and an immutable record. OpenIDL uses blockchain to pursue a path of data security, privacy and transparency. Brian: blockchain is a shared system of record amongst participants in a commercial ecosystem. Brian, compares blockchain to the mid and late 90s w