Blockchain: Shaping the new rules of the road

Blockchain, a public ledger technology, was introduced in 2009. The technology is still maturing just like the early days of the Internet and GPS where regulators, businesses, and thought leaders are shaping the new “rules of the road.” Blockchain supports a new digital form for anything of value like stocks, bonds, money, digital property, titles, or deeds where the asset needs to be transferred, stored and managed. This technology has the opportunity to disrupt existing norms, transform business processes, immediately settle financial transactions, and generate cost efficiencies by lowering or eliminating intermediary service fees.

I am excited that we, Aegon, have entered into a partnership called the  Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i, along with Allianz, Munich RE, Swiss Re and Zurich. As a group will be focusing on a number of use cases, with a view to establishing standards that as an industry we can adopt.

Industry adoption

As a result Blockchain is one of the technologies, that as Global Technology Design group within a financial services organisation, we have been keeping a close eye in regards to industry adoption. There are many organisations and start-ups now focusing on how blockchain can be utilised to satisfy a multitude of use cases, from my perspective it is now starting to be a race to establish the first industry wide standard enabling and encouraging adoption. Within the FS Industry we have a high volume of potential use cases which span our: B2B, internal and B2C processes. All of which would benefit from distributed ledger capability, as it is not limited to financial transactions. 

As we focus on becoming a digital business and in doing so serving our customers more efficiently and securely, I believe Blockchain will play a part in our transformation in the near future. It is for this reason, I am excited that we, Aegon, have entered into a partnership called the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i, along with Allianz, Munich RE, Swiss Re and Zurich. As a group will be focusing on a number of use cases, with a view to establishing standards that as an industry we can adopt. This is not a closed group and is open to other participants joining. You can find out more about the group here.

Some of the potential use cases that we see coming to fruition in our industry are centered around:

• Asset Settlement, reducing the time and increasing transparency and operational efficiency.
• Fraud Prevention / Minimizing Risk, improving identity verification and transaction processing.
• Payments, improving the real time payment capability.
• Re-Insurance, source of truth for reinsured policies.

Blockchain also has the potential to lower operational costs, decease our settlement risk, whist increasing the speed of transitions and automation . Blockchain will play a part as we componetise our architecture and build out the platform ecosystem across the organisation, to better serve our customers in a digital way, enabling us to react more effectively to the changing customer needs.