From the creators of Qfund, the largest crowdfunding online platform in Asia comes the Hi Mutual Society (HMS) Project that plans to form the world’s first decentralized Mutual Society on the blockchain to address the challenges of the insurance industry.
Insurance is All About Security
On the basic premise that all insurance centers around security and the management of risk, HMS believes that mutual support provides the best solution to hedging and mitigating risk, utilizing smart contracts and decentralized technologies of blockchain to bring efficiency and credibility to the sphere.
The HMS head of product operations explained that the company would create mutual support plans that would mirror their standard insurance policy counterparts, with the main difference being that they would not be “rigidly redeemed”.
Initially starting with two Clients business, HMS will launch different mutual support plans based on different scenarios, such as mutual plan with sickness, mutual plan in bad weather, and mutual plan in disasters.
The HMS Advantage
Once the HMS platform is active, third parties can use the contract ecosystem to build their own mutual support contracts, with a planned open source code to be shared once a decentralized application (DAPP) is completed. With a unified user system, instant messaging and other modules, developers need only edit the conditions of smart contracts.
Smart contracts will make the conditions and operational logic of all mutual support plans transparent and permanent, increasing the trust in these mutual plans. Blockchain security also protects user data and funds from being stolen, making the HMS platform the most credible solution available in the insurance industry. Users no longer need to worry about central database hacks, using private keys to execute smart contracts.
Because smart contract conditions are fully transparent, grievances and scope of liability exemptions are also clear, which improves user experience. In addition, as all user data is more easily and accurately retrievable on the blockchain, investigations are quicker. This also overcomes the challenge of traditional insurance, in which most data is not fully digitized or easily accessible, with delays due to transport and shipping affecting most claims.
Another natural benefit will be the lowered costs. Without overheads and labor payments, via a fully automated system of participating, paying and settling plans, payout cycles have fewer delays and cost less.
How HMS Will Work
HMS will first create a basis for members to benefit and participate in mutual support plans, represented by Hi Mutual Certificates (HMCs). Users will need to acquire a certain number of these HMCs in order to participate in a mutual support plan of their choice, accessing the platform via a DAPP.
Once on the platform, users can join mutual plans, manage accounts, submit required documentation and participate in the community operations.
Having joined these mutual support plans, users stand to receive equal shares from other users if certain conditions are triggered. Existing participants of a plan will temporarily lose membership should their HMC balances be lower than the minimum requirements of a single payout.
According to the project’s whitepaper, the platform will feature two major profit models. The first charges a percentage from fees of the mutual support plans, while the other charges support plan providers fees and Gas (Ether paid to miners to confirm transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, upon which HMS is built).
Building a Global Network of Mutual Support
HMS believes that as more third parties use HMS to build and offer their own mutual support plans, the market can expand not only for insurance providers but also for new users, noting that domestic mutual support plans have grown to about 50 million over the past two years – where only some are original users, the majority of which are new users encouraged by optimization in the industry.
With a tokenized system as implemented on the HMS platform, a new horizon of global users is a huge untapped potential for mutual support markets. Financially and operationally backed by the core team of Qfund and payment company Circle, the HMS development team features a diverse skill set including product management, operations, and tech.
HMS plans to launch its community products and private beta of DAPP over April-September 2018, and public beta of DAPP in Q1 2019.