Blockchain, future of insurance? How? The purpose of non-life insurance is to indemnify an insured person after the occurrence of an insured risk. No more and no less. You insure an object against damage, it gets damaged and this will or will not be determined. The damage will be stopped under the conditions and payment will or will not be made. In this seemingly simple process, however, several parties are involved, including in many cases the policyholder, the insurance intermediary and the insurance company.
The insurer’s service consists of settling the claim. In order to find out whether specific conditions are met, insurers exchange information with each other. And if it can be demonstrated that a certain event has taken place and specific rules have been met, the policyholder receives the money. However, this simple process is time-consuming, not transparent and often leads to incomprehe
nsion, dissatisfaction, high costs and sometimes even fraud.
In practice, the claims handling process still requires a lot of paperwork. It’s all about trust. With all kinds of forms and accompanying signatures we try to structure trust. We have been doing this in more or less the same way for hundreds of years. However, today we still make far too little use of available, new technology to help us structure trust in an automated way. With blockchain technology, we are able to fully automate trust. We lay down all the rules in advance in so-called smart contracts. We then have computer systems check whether these rules have been complied with. No one is involved in this any more. There are many advantages. The increased efficiency immediately results in faster turnaround times in the event of an insurance claim. Because a lot of human interaction in the core becomes superfluous, the chance of errors is small and the risk of fraud is minimized. And this benefits all parties in the chain.
In the coming years, blockchain technology, together with artificial intelligence and big data, will lead to a true revolution in the insurance industry. With a positive customer experience and lower premiums as a big profit.
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Erwin Giesbers