By
Mayowa Adebajo
March 12th, 2024
The Insurwave platform supports more than half-million automated ledger transactions and will manage risks for more than a 1000 commercial vessels in the first year of its deployment.
Blockchain technology has proved to be quite useful in transforming and streamlining the operations of the insurance sector within the financial space. But another area which is finding a growing application of the blockchain technology is the marine-shipment industry.
Last year, Denmark-based transport and logistics company, Maersk, had partnered with IBM to develop a new blockchain-based platform to manage cross-border transactions in the shipping supply chain. Taking it digitisation drive further, AP Møller-Maersk has now commercially started using the Insurwave Blockchain Platform, which is the world’s first decentralized blockchain platform developed for the marine insurance industry.
Insurwave is a joint venture between Guardtime and EY for the marine insurance industry which makes use of the blockchain platform and DLT technologies from Microsoft Azure and ACORD data standards. The Insurwave platform is now live for commercial transactions and is also used by some other insurance companies like Willis Towers Watson, XL Catlin and MS Amlin.
The Insurwave platform supports more than half-million automated ledger transactions and will manage risks for more than a 1000 commercial vessels in the first year of its deployment. While releasing this platform, EY said:
By connecting participant in a secure, private network with an accurate, immutable audit tral and service to execute processes, the platform establishes a first-of-its-kind digital insurance value chain.
Lars Henneberg, A.P. Møller-Maersk A/S Head of Risk and Insurance, says:
“Our ambition is to drive the digital transformation of the transport and logistics industry and we see this platform as a testament to the value that can be extracted from streamlining areas of our industry that still rely on manual and often complex procedures. Operating around 350 owned container vessels across the world, marine insurance takes up considerable resources for us. Moving it to this platform is helping us automate manual processes and alleviate a range of inefficiencies and frictional costs in the way we have used to trade marine insurance.”
Although the first phase of Insurwave is marine insurance, the companies are willing to expand the services further to other areas such as the marine cargo, global logistics, aviation and energy sectors.
Shaun Crawford, EY Global Insurance Leader, says:
“It is a proud moment for a number of heavy weight industry participants to be live with a genuine end-to-end blockchain platform in the specialty insurance market. All parties have worked extraordinarily hard, as a closely knit team, to get to this exciting milestone. To move from proof of concept just a year ago to a fully functioning platform that is delivering immediate value to clients feels exceptional.”
Mike Gault, Guardtime CEO, says:
“We are very proud of the work we have done with EY in developing this platform, beginning with a proof of concept a year ago and then all the way through to this production release. This represents an important milestone not only for the insurance industry but also for blockchain technology, proving it can deliver real value to enterprise customers.”