B3i’s Blockchain Platform Places 30 Reinsurance Contracts, Including Cat XoL Treaties

B3i Services AG, a two-year-old company owned by members of the insurance industry, announced that 30 contracts of reinsurance have been concluded on its platform, including some of the most complex catastrophe excess of loss (XoL) reinsurance treaties.

Nine insurers, four major brokerage firms and eight reinsurers participated in the placements, which were conducted as a parallel run with the January 2020 renewals, or as a re-creation.

B3i, insurers, brokers, and reinsurers have worked collaboratively to set up distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure, conduct user acceptance testing, and train end users. The transactions were conducted in B3i’s application, but third parties may build their own applications atop B3i’s APIs (application program interfaces).

“B3i’s platform shows what’s possible for greatly easing the placement process for all parties involved, and it’s very promising,” said Dr. Silvio Tschudi, senior retrocession manager at Allianz Re. “Working with our brokers and reinsurers during the placement process, across the B3i platform, has shown improved efficiencies and complete contract certainty.”

Alberto Valenti, head of Group Reinsurance at Generali, commented: “Our company has tested the potential of B3i’s application recreating the placement of the group cat program after the end of the 2020 renewal. Generali has extended the parallel run also to two selected intra-group reinsurance cat programs observing several potential benefits in adopting the application for the intra-group transactions. Our main brokers and reinsurers have been involved.”

In 2020, B3i intends to continue to develop its reinsurance platform to include additional types of reinsurance and modules for technical accounting and claims, thus covering the full lifecycle of a reinsurance contract. Further, B3i said it will expand into large commercial applications.

B3i said it will conduct a fundraising round in 2020 which will be open to insurers, brokers, reinsurers and industry service providers.

“The reinsurance transactions show that distributed ledger technology will be a powerful solution for insurers, brokers and reinsurers to grow their business while creating material efficiencies over existing technology. B3i offers the only DLT-based solution in production and capable of handling reinsurance placements today,” said John Carolin, CEO of B3i.

“We invite all participants in the insurance industry to work with B3i to improve risk transfer using distributed ledger technology – whether by investing and joining our governance, by using the platform for transactions, or by partnering to develop new solutions,” he added.

B3i Chairman Antony Elliot said: “B3i has always been by the industry, for the industry. Our global shareholders and B3i’s talented team have built the only application that uses distributed ledger technology to facilitate reinsurance placements. B3i looks forward to expanding our engagement with insurers, brokers, and reinsurers to develop the platform’s capabilities further considering reinsurance and commercial insurance use cases.”

B3i is a global initiative supported by 20 major insurance industry investors and a diverse community currently comprising over 40 companies. B3i was founded in October 2016 as an insurance industry consortium, which in March 2018 formed B3i Services AG as an independent company. B3i is building a broadly supported platform and protocol to address critical insurance industry needs through growing its network and developing partnerships with other company-led and industry-led initiatives throughout the world.

B3i currently has 20 shareholders – all insurers or reinsurers – from Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa. They are: Achmea, Aegon, Africa Re, Ageas, Allianz, AXA, China Pacific Insurance, Deutsche Rück, Generali, Hannover Re, IRB Brasil Re, Liberty Mutual, Mapfre Re, Munich Re, SBI Group, SCOR, Swiss Re, Tokio Marine, VIG Re, and Zurich Insurance Group.

Source: B3i

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