IT services giant Cognizant, along with a consortium of Indian life insurers have developed a blockchain based solution to facilitate secure data sharing among companies. The technology is designed to help insurers reduce the risk of data breaches, fraud and money-laundering, while at the same attaining better efficiency, record-keeping and faster turnaround time.
Among those that assisted Cognizant in building the blockchain solution were SBI Life Insurance, Max Life Insurance, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance, Edelweiss Tokio Life, IDBI Federal Life Insurance, Birla Sun Life Insurance, HDFC Life, Kotak Life, Tata AIA Life, PNB MetLife, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Bharti AXA, Aegon Life, and SUD (Star Union Dai-ichi) Life Insurance.
Commenting on the development, Anand Pejawar, President — Operations, IT and International Business, SBI Life said, “Blockchain has the potential to catalyse a significant shift in the insurance industry’s underlying technology and business models. With its model of immutable and decentralised data, and its ability to prevent tampered documents and false billings from falling through the cracks, blockchain can enable insurance providers to introduce new models, reinvent processes, and increase capacity.”
The solution, which has been developed as part of a collaborative blockchain initiative, is based on Corda, a distributed ledger platform built by R3 and hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. The technology, according to its markets, can enable insurers to reduce their dependence on data aggregators and intermediaries, which often makes them vulnerable to attacks and breaches.
Currently, insurance companies collect customer and policy information for different purposes like KYC-related due diligence, financial and medical underwriting, risk assessment, fraud detection, and regulatory compliance, among other things.
With the help of the new blockchain solution by Cognizant and others, these companies are striving to offer improved customer experience by ensuring real-time availability, transparency and consistency of records. Because these records can be audited at any time with easy traceability, storing data on blockchain will also help insurers reduce operating costs, avoid duplication of procedures, and streamline approvals.
Speaking on the matter, Arun Baid, Global Delivery Head for Insurance, Cognizant said in a statement, “As a shared source of truth, blockchain opens numerous possibilities for insurers to collaborate more effectively and transparently, make better-informed decisions, and create greater trust and accountability. Our comprehensive blockchain and domain capabilities built over the years have made us a trusted advisor for insurance companies to realize distributed ledger’s full potential.”
The development comes just over three months after reports surfaced that more than a dozen insurers in India joined hands to start a blockchain project, in a bid to help rein in costs for companies running medical tests and evaluations.
At the time, it was said that the insurance companies had tied up with IBM and Cateina Technologies to create a blockchain-based solution for KYC, medical records, and agent track records while flagging fraudulent transactions.