Marsh Makes Blockchain Proof of Insurance Accessible Through Salesforce

Insurance broker Marsh is expanding its collaboration with IBM to provide clients with access to the industry’s first commercial blockchain product for proof of insurance through the Salesforce customer management platform.

Blockchain technology promises to automate and streamline the proof of insurance process, making the proof available immediately and allowing clients to speed up their hiring of contractors.

Sastry Durvasula, Marsh’s chief officer for Digital, Data and Analytics, is scheduled to demonstrate the initiative today at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, taking place in San Francisco.

A distributed ledger technology, blockchain establishes a shared, immutable record of all the transactions that take place within a network and then enables permissioned parties access to trusted data in real-time. Since proof of insurance is a key business requirement in many industries, this blockchain solution allows the creation of a network of networks to provide verification on a much broader scale, according to Marsh.

“Distributed ledger technologies are driving efficiency across many industries by enabling legacy manual processes to operate more efficiently and with greater transparency and trust,” said Sandip Patel, general manager, insurance industry, IBM. “This innovation is an ideal example of how blockchain can be used to drive real business results and collaboration in the insurance industry.”

Marsh announced in April the first commercial proof of insurance blockchain product in conjunction with IBM, with input from insurance standards organization ACORD and customer feedback from ISN, a contractor and supplier information management firm.

The blockchain is built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric technology and IBM Blockchain Platform.