B3i (Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative), a consortium of few European insurance companies formed for leveraging blockchain in insurance, decided to collaborate with Corda to develop its network, according to its official press release. To make this collaboration possible, it left IBM and Hyperledger Fabric out. As per the statement from B3i, the decision to opt for solutions by Corda over Hyperledger was taken after an “extensive evaluation”. During the evaluation, it analyzed the open source blockchain technologies against the strategy of the B3i enterprise platform. Moreover, various critical success factors were considered. They include data privacy, developer productivity, interoperability, and scalability.
B3i is a collaboration between 13 insurance and reinsurance firms from Europe formed in October 2016. They have been finding ways to make data exchange between organizations efficient with the help of blockchain technology and smart contracts.
Commenting on the decision, Markus Tradt, CTO at B3i told GTR that the decision was finalized during the first quarter of the year. He added, “We did the prototype and market testing with 38 companies. This was built in a test environment and at some point, we recognized that in order to bring this into production, we had to do a review of the criteria, what is important to get this into an enterprise-ready product. Our evaluation led to the conclusion that Corda, for our use case, is the best technology and the one where we think we can have the quickest time to market.”
The considerations around privacy was one of the prime factors that led the decision to select Corda. Corda’s design practices privacy in a spectacular way. Corda shares the information on a transaction level between parties. It does not share information with parties that are not involved, and this consideration is important to Bi3. It is significant for the consortium to keep transaction information private between counterparties. Another crucial factor that led to the selection of Corda was “developer productivity”. Corda would help the consortium to bring a product to the market faster. As the consortium has started to migrate on the new platform, the CTO expects that the production-ready version will be available for live testing by the end of this year.
Many studies have been published that outlines current happening and its impact on the global blockchain in the insurance market. Big Market Research has also added a report on the industry, titled, “Global Blockchain In Insurance Market Size, Status And Forecast 2025”. The report provides detailed analysis on competitive status & trend, key market players, and development status & outlook to help market players, investors, and new entrants determine strategies that can be adopted to gain a competitive advantage in the global industry.