Insureblocks

Michele Curtoni heads the strategy and new business development at SDX, SIX's regulated digital asset exchange platform, which is part of the SIX Financial Group, the financial market infrastructure of Switzerland. In this podcast we discuss a wide range of topics from wholesale CBDC projects, cryptocurrencies and a lot more from the optic of a regulated digital asset platform. What is blockchain? The first time Michele was explained what is blockchain was in 2014/15. At that time it was described to him as an append only data structure. It's an Excel where you never can delete a row, you can only add them, but you can look up whatever you wrote before and what other people wrote before it. It has a chatter effect where you have to validate what is heard by the participants in a “room”. In terms of how it applies to the financial industries, it comes down to the ledger, the compression of the ledger, intermediaries and malicious actors onto a network and how the validation of the blocks would work. SIX and SDX SIX is the financial market infrastructure of Switzerland. SIX operates the infrastructure for the Swiss and Spanish financial centres. The BME (Bolsa de Madrid), the stock exchange of Spain, was acquired by SIX in 2020. SIX runs the CSD, central securities depository, in Spain, the clearing house called X-Clear and the listed exchange. Michele describes, SDX as a bet that SIX took a few years ago to start capitalising on the blockchain revolution. There was a recognition that SIX needed to prepare itself for this digital revolution of digital assets and crypto currencies hitting the traditional FMI space. SDX was built to cater for this new business, of both crypto and digital securities by creating a kind of CSD on blockchain to tokenise those digital regulated securities. In September 2021, FINMA, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority issued two approvals to operate financial market infrastructures based on blockchain. Specifically, FINMA has authorized SIX Digital Exchange AG to act as a central securities depository and the associated company SDX Trading AG to act as a stock exchange. This was the first time that a licence has been issued in the Swiss financial centre for infrastructures that facilitate the trading of digital securities in the form of tokens and their integrated settlement. This proved that you can build a CSD under a specific regulatory regime, using a private DLT This allows for atomic settlements, trading and settling at the same time, and for smart contract enablement. In November 2021, SIX issued its own dual tranche bond to fund the M&A transaction to acquire BME. The CHF 150m ($162m) bond was composed of a CHF 100m digital bond listed on SDX and CHF 50 million conventional bond listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. The splitting of that bond in this manner was voted by the participants. The bond was oversubscribed and the rating was equal across the two channels. Wholesale CBDC projects SDX participated in two wholesale CBDC projects. Project Helvetia, was conducted by SND, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), SIX/SDX and 5 commercial banks. The project looked at introducing a Digital Swiss Franc as a CBDC in Switzerland. Project Jura, the second wholesale CBDC project involved Banque de France, BIS, SDX and the Swiss National Bank. The project aimed       to enable instant settlement of foreign currency transactions as payment versus payment (PvP) and the use of wholesale CBDC to pay for tokenized commercial paper transactions as delivery versus payment (DvP) with immediate settlement. The project also aimed to explore how cross border central bank movements of assets and money would work. It looked at the concept of DvP, of commercial paper, in this case issued under French law against a Euro CBDC and then a PvP of that Euro CBDC versus the Swiss Franc CBDC. So, a transfer of assets versus cash and then cash versus cash.

Iota Nassr is a policy analyst at the OECD within the financial markets division. She currently manages the FinTech experts group of the OECD Committee on Financial Markets, leading the analysis around anything that has to do with digitalization of finance. The OECD Report “Why decentralised finance matters and the policy implications” is product of the committee's expert group composed of representatives of the 38 OECD members coming from Central Banks, Ministry of Finance and other financial authorities.   What is blockchain? Iota's definition of blockchain hasn't changed much since her previous podcast on Insureblocks on “Tokenisation of Assets and Potential Implications for Financial Markets – OECD Report” on the 13th of June 2021. She still sees blockchain and DLT, more broadly, as a way to record, share information and to exchange value in a decentralised manner without the need for trusted central authorities or intermediaries. However now she believes the emphasis is now more on the programmable nature of decentralised distributed ledger technologies and the level of disintermediation involved in the different networks and structures that we observe in the market.   Why this report? The Summer of 2020, also known as the DeFi summer caught the attention of the OECD. This was due to the exponential growth they were observing and the level of participation of retail investors in what is a very highly volatile market that is devoid of the traditional safeguards that are in place for investors and consumers in traditional financial markets. The feedback loops they have observed between DeFi and mainstream crypto such as Bitcoin, Ether ,the main stable coins along with the recycling of profits between the two kinds of environments, made it increasingly critical for the OECD to have a look at this space. The final reason for analysing this market was the growing institutionalisation of crypto assets, which may be increasing risks of interconnectedness between decentralised and traditional finance. This report's objectives is to like into DeFi models to understand the risks, opportunities and implications for traditional finance.   What is Defi? DeFi, decentralised finance, claims to replicate what is known as traditional finance in a decentralised way in an open way through applications built on Ethereum and increasingly on other blockchains. There are two possible misconceptions around DeFi. The first is that not all DLT based financial applications are DeFi. So the fact that a financial application is built on the blockchain does not make it by default part of DeFi. The second misconception has to do with self proclaimed DeFi applications that may not be truly decentralised. The degree of decentralisation varies from one project to another. The report defines three key defining features: Non-custodial: The protocols and the applications have a non-custodial nature. There is no central authority or other intermediary gains access to or control over participants' digital assets; instead, participants manage their private keys, and therefore their digital assets, directly. Self-governed and community-driven: Most DeFi protocols are open-source and allow the community to review and further develop the code underlying the protocols. This happens through the use of governance tokens. Composable: Existing components of DeFi networks (i.e. digital assets, smart contracts, protocols and applications built on top of the protocol layer) can be combined to create new applications. The open source nature of DeFi applications is a critical enabler of this attribute, as it allows everyone to look at the code and use it to create new applications. Source: OECD Report Author   Most popular DeFi products The concept of liquidity mining and of collateralized lending on the DeFi lending protocols was one of the most obvious ways for investors to earn yield on the back of mainstream crypto...

In 2016, Etherisc was one of the first companies to launch a real world use case for a flight delay insurance policy on a public blockchain. Regulatory and lack of stable coin hindered that early solution. In 2017, they relaunched along with an insurance partner but still had challenges. In today's podcast, Christoph Mussenbrock – CEO & Founder of Etherisc shares with us what they have learned since 2016 and why their 2022 launch is going to win.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a technology which allows you to keep a distributer ledger of transactions. It comes in two flavour as either a public or private blockchain. In a public blockchain, all participants can validate transactions independently thus creating a new level of trust. Some of these public blockchain such as Ethereum offer programmable computing, which enables the running of programs such as smart contracts. Smart contracts can be used to programme a complete insurance business process on top of blockchain which is what Etherisc is doing.   About Etherisc Over the years, Insureblocks has featured a number of Etherisc's spokesperson such as Stephan Karpischek, Renat Khasanshyn and Michiel Berende. Etherisc was started in 2016 by Chistoph and Stephan when they develop a small prototype for flight delay insurance that they presented at DEFCON2, an Ethereum Developer conference in Shanghai. At that time it was one of the first insurance real world applications. Soon after developing this prototype the Etherisc team started encountering legal and regulatory issues. Whilst tackling those issues they decided to build a whole platform where anybody could build products on top of it, something akin to an operating system for insurance products. This platform is an open-source common infrastructure, the Generic Insurance Framework (GIF), which includes shared smart contracts, product templates, microservices and the native cryptographic token (DIP) to enable the seamless and efficient creation of decentralized insurance products, with increased transparency and fairness for all parties. Over the last few years they have developed a new legal model which for the German market and most other European countries which enables them to run insurance products without needing an insurance license which can be quite expensive with a large number of regulatory compliance issues. This new legal model enables Etherisc to design insurance products without the need of a formal insurance license with the approval of the German financial regulator. Projects currently hosted on Etherisc's open-source Generic Insurance Framework include FlightDelay Insurance, Crop Insurance, and Hurricane Protection.   Flight delay insurance, relaunch? When Etherisc's flight delay insurance launched as a prototype in 2016 it had no legal framework and no stable coin to leverage for it to have a compelling proposition. The lack of a stable coin meant a highly volatile risk with the use of Ethereum coin leading to insurance payout of either nothing or very large sums of money. In 2017, Etherisc partnered with Atlas Insurance PCC to address the lack of an insurance license. Etherisc could effectively rent the Atlas Insurance license. However, a Stamp Tax of $15 for each policy meant launching the flight delay proposition was not feasible as the average premium was around $15. It was only in 2022 that Etherisc could successfully launch their Flight Delay product with a solid legal framework and a stable coin like DAI with which it could run its transactions on.   Thoughts on Fizzy from AXA In August 2018, Insureblocks featured Fizzy, AXA's flight delay insurance policy, which subsequently closed in 2020. You can listen to their learnings of that experience on an Insureblocks podcast. Christoph view on that is that AXA like other traditional financial companies, typically have very complex internal IT systems which are heavily regulated.

In this podcast we had the pleasure of having Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute and John Reynolds, COO and founder of Coadjute return to Insureblocks to share with us the launch of their real estate blockchain platform and their thoughts on a mortgage stablecoin.   What is blockchain? Dan's definition of blockchain: In our previous podcast, Dan had used the glass box theory as an analogy to explain what is blockchain. For this podcast he uses a football match. In the old days before live TV existed, you had to rely on a newspaper reporter or a friend at a pub explaining to you what happened in a match that you had missed. In that scenario you have to rely and trust somebody else to share that information accurately and reliably to you. What blockchain does to the property market is that it introduces the possibility of live TV where you can form your own opinion as to what happened as can everybody else. Blockchain brings that sense of all its participants having the information for themselves without having to rely on some other intermediary to give them second hand information. John's definition of blockchain: In August 2020, John saw blockchain as allowing the data to flow between the various different systems. Now for him, blockchain is fundamentally about trust. It's the identity on the digital trust ecosystem that Coadjute has built by connecting numerous platforms and putting in a trusted identity. The data flows whilst important, can only be trusted if you know the identity of the source of the data. Digital identity and trust is fundamental.   Who is Coadjute? Coadjute recognises that today the experience of buying and selling property in the UK, and in most other countries, is a complex and fragmented activity that takes a very long time, requires the coordination of a lot of parties and is overall a difficult, slow and frustrating experience for both the buyer and the seller.   It's the same for the people involved in the property market whether it is for the professions involved in legal, real estate, government, financial and son on. They all have to come together on a property transaction for it to work. Today there is no market infrastructure like the ones you find for the stock exchange and others.   What Coadjute does is that it acts as a trusted network that connects all the systems of the different players in the property market in an interoperable manner. This means whether you're a real estate agent, a legal conveyancer, a mortgage broker you can access your regular platform and yet still have access to the activities of the other parties involved in your transaction. You can see what is being done in real time, share messages, documents, identity funds and much more. Pilot launch The housing market in UK is composed of numerous parties ranging from legal firms, estate agents, and lenders to mortgage brokers. Today's property process involves waiting for documentation, chasing for updates, rekeying data and endless uploading of documents, all of which add to the time and cost of the property transaction. With more than 25% of deals currently falling through and billions lost in efficiencies, Coadjute is introducing R3's enterprise blockchain technology to help solve this problem. With the Coadjute network, there is greater transparency, a reduced risk of fraud and an accelerated process with significantly less admin. Conveyancers will be able to protect sensitive client data by Coadjute's encrypted network, which only the conveyancer and the receiving party can see. In addition, all parties involved in a property deal – including the estate agent, conveyancer, mortgage lender, and broker – can track the live progress of the transaction from their existing software. Launching in July 2021, with the first live property deal on the network, a 3-bedroom house, Kent, Coadjute has ambitions to reduce the 5-month average process for buying and selling property by half.

Todd McDonald is the co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at R3. In this podcast we discuss R3's Product Vision and their views on market trends, market needs and R3's long term product investment.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a way for multiple participants to join a network and update the state of that network without having to trust someone to coordinate amongst them. For businesses, Todd sees blockchain as a way to connect with more customers and more businesses without having to worry as much around the trust factor.   Three market trends Back in September of this year Todd presented at CordaCon a presentation entitled “R3 Product Vision: Market Trends, Market Needs and R3's Long-Term Product Investment.”In it he started by analysing three market trends: “Everything is an asset”, “push-pull of (de)centralisation” “Plan ahead for regulation”.   Everything is an asset Blockchain has the ability to create digital scarcity. Essentially anything that you can prove ownership of can become an asset. Assets can be digitally mobile such as NFTs and/or they can be used as collateral for a loan. A digital asset of course can be the digital manifestation or representation of a real physical asset but equally it could also by a pure digital asset. Pure digital assets, such as the purchase of digital property in the Metaverse, have recently seen a bit of an explosive growth. Republic Realm purchased a $4.3 million 24x24 digital piece of land, whilst Metaverse Group in November made a $2.43 million purchase of parcels in Decentraland.   Push-Pull of (de)centralisation Blockchains are custody and software. They're the ability to custody digital assets in the software layer without having the need of human beings. Todd shared with us that some of the biggest investors in this space so far have been existing intermediaries. Financial market infrastructure is heavily investing in distributed systems and blockchain. He then explains what he sees as the different facets of the decentralisation journey: You need critical mass and become successful. There needs to be a journey to attract people to a network and distribute the roles of that network. Potentially over time the network can become more distributed to decentralised. What is interesting about the crypto side is that with tokenomics all participants can be incentivised from day one onto a decentralised network Progressive decentralisation a term coined by Jesse Walden, from Andreesen Horowitz, talks about starting out within a bootstrap minimum viable ecosystem, ie. quite centralised, which as it grows can progress into a decentralised one   Plan ahead for regulation Once regulation starts it pretty much only increases. This comment isn't specifically related to crypto regulation but more on financial services. There is an increasing amount of regulatory imperatives  such as open banking, GDPR, and Central Securities Depository Regulation (CSDR).   Modernising market infrastructure SIX digital exchange became live on the 18th of November 2021, when SIX, launched a CHF 150 million ($162 million) tokenised digital bond with Credit Suisse, UBS Investment Bank, and Zürcher Kantonalbank acting as the joint lead managers. What is interesting about this new digital market infrastructure that SIX launched off an R3 Enterprise Corda blockchainis that it leverages an existing ecosystem that SIX had. Second it has the ability to handle an asset through its lifecycle from cradle to grave. Three the settlement process, of settling into what is in effect into a central bank digital currency. What this illustrates is a way for these new tokenized assets to have higher velocity and to be able to reach across borders in a way that regulators are ok with.   Corda & Conclave Early on it with the launch of Corda, it became clear that industries wanted to bootstrap networks where the founding participants wanted to control those net...

Over the last 12 months Decentralised Finance also known as DeFi has really exploded with reported total value locked reaching $250bn.  R3 who operates in the permissioned blockchain space is spinning out Obscuro into the permissionless space of DeFi. In this podcast we're joined by James Carlyle who explains the DeFi landscape, the challenges it faces in terms of privacy and scalability and how Obscuro can address these.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed databased. Instead of one party running it, it is run as a network by a group of entities who don't necessarily trust each other. It contains features that ensure that entities don't need to trust each other, they can trust the infrastructure and the code itself. James has been on a blockchain journey since 2015 when he started off with permissionless public systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum prior to joining R3 in 2015 and helping to design Corda. Corda though had a very different principles than permissionless public systems as it was designed as a permissioned blockchain. The participants all have a verified identity so you know who you are dealing with, whilst on permissionless system they have a pseudonym. Now with Obscuro, James is returning to permissionless public systems.   Decentralised finance (DeFi) Over the last 12 months Decentralised Finance also known as DeFi has really exploded. A few weeks ago JP Morgan reports that total value locked (TVL) has grown from last year's $20bn to $200bn today. For James, Defi is an expression of freedom and of innovation. It's growing very rapidly as it's able to innovate at lightspeed. All of these applications are open source which means that it is possible to take an existing idea to either build upon it or in some cases to steal it and simply rebrand it. These things increase the level of innovation and increase the level of take up. At the heart of DeFi is transparency. It runs on permissionless systems, which means anyone can take part, download the data and help in the validation process. The first generation of DeFi builders and users were not interested in privacy and James believes that DeFi is heading towards a new generation to builders and users who are aiming for a more mass market where privacy is important. The ECB released a report on the digital Euro where privacy is seen as a key digital enabler. Whilst privacy is important it can unfortunately also be used as a cloak for illegal behaviour. For DeFi to be picked up and used by the mass market it has to be more regulated. Regulation needs identity and KYC. R3 is uniquely placed to interact in this space as it has this rich heritage of having very strong ties with regulation and regulators   Miner extractable value (MEV) In a public blockchain system such as Ethereum there are participants who are submitting transactions. Miners who are here to confirm transactions can see the contents of the transactions that users have submitted. They can take advantage of it in some cases in what is called front running. For example, if you want to buy something on the market you don't want someone else to bid the price up ahead of the transaction. That's what is possible when a miner can spot that a user is trying to something and they decide to step in first and thus get the transaction before the user and the user is left behind buying it at a higher price. It has been estimated that around $1.4 billion of MEV is being taken from Ethereum blockchain users annually from a total DeFi market of around $50 billion. Global financial markets are worth $100 trillion. One of the main motivations of Obscuro is to help solve some of these issues.   Ethereum scalability issues Ethereum to some extent is a victim of its own success as it suffers from scalability issues. With the explosion of DeFi projects, and their corresponding transactions that need to be processed by all of the nodes on the Ethereum network,

Tim Nelson is the CEO of Hope for Justice and is part of the founding board of the charity which exists to try and end all forms of human trafficking and modern slavery across the globe. They work alongside major multinational businesses through an organisation called the Slave Free Alliance that they set up a few years ago.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed database that is shared between the nodes of computer. It stores information electronically in a digital format. It maintains a secure and decentralised record of transactions and what differentiates it to other databases is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record. This generates trust without the need of a third party.   Modern Slavery According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) there are 40.3 million people in forced labour, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, organ harvesting and forced marriage worldwide: Including 24.9 million in forced labour and 4 million in forced marriage. It means there are 4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 peoplein the world 1 in 4 victims of modern slavery are children. Out of the 9 millionpeople trapped in forced labour, 16 million people are exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture; 4.8 million persons in forced sexual exploitation, and 4 million persons in forced labour imposed by state authorities. Women and girls are disproportionately affectedby forced labour, accounting for 99% of victims in the commercial sex industry, and 58% in other sectors Global Estimates of Modern Slavery Most people think that slavery was ended with the William Wilberforce Day. However every day around the world people are being trafficked every day. They are forced to work within the supply chains of major multinational businesses, into all forms of sexual exploitation, into forced domestic servitude and in countries where there is no organ donation scheme, there is organ harvesting. Most people are shocked to know that for example in the UK, the number one place people are trafficked to the UK is actually from the UK. People are actually taken in the UK. When Hope for Justice started doing rescue and investigation in the UK, the organisation started in an area in West Yorkshire that covers 2.2m people. At that time the entire police force across England and Wales had rescued 88 individuals and said that was the extent of it through an operation called Pentameter one. Hope for Justice within its first year of operation in just West Yorkshire alone, rescued 110 victims of which the youngest was just three months old trafficked for sexual exploitation and the oldest was 58 years old for forced labour.   Impact of COVID The impact of COVID has been massive on everyone around the world. The shutting down has made a bigger impact on the most vulnerable in the world. Farmers have missed crop planting or harvesting whilst others haven't been able to go to work putting them into a very vulnerable situation. It is in that backdrop that we see a real shift happening. Companies have rolled back efforts the they were doing globally. According to Tim, COVID has probably hit back the movement against modern slavery about 10 – 15 years. The vulnerabilities that existed in communities have been exasperated by COVID and one where traffickers have gone in to exploit those individuals who have the greatest degree of vulnerability. The degree of this impact is going to be felt for the decades to come as individuals who have had to take on debt, many of them are going to become debt bonded to the individual traffickers themselves. Whilst those who have taken loans whose interest rate is so high that the will never be able to pay off those loans. There is a quarry in India where 30,000 families are debt bonded to the quarry.   A $150 billion industry According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) forced labour generate...

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are increasingly being talked about in the press with announcements of initiatives from different central banks working on CBDCs coming out left right and centre. Few however are as forward thinking and embracing a collaborative approach as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). For this podcast we are joined by Daniel Eidan,  Adviser and Solution Architect at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the Innovation Hub where he builds technology solutions for the central banking community with a special focus on blockchain and CBDC. He will share with us some of the exciting work his team are doing for driving CBDC forward.   What is blockchain? Blockchain and DLT is often referred to as Web 3.0 whilst the internet of today is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 enables to globally connect communications protocol whilst blockchain and Web 3.0 isn't just about putting communication protocols digitally but to store value digitally. What blockchain enables is to execute computations between different members and keep a record of state. Essentially as Daniel mentions we can encapsulate value. Value can be cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies, contracts and many other forms of value. This wasn't something possible in the Web 2.0 because the fundamentals weren't there.   What are CBDCs? To fully understand what CBDCs, central bank digital currency, are you first need to understand what is a currency. Money and currency in general have three attributes: They are a unit of account A store of value A medium of exchange What central bank digital currencies do is that they digitise those three attributes.   To explain how this happens Daniel uses the “money flower” approach which looks at its four different attributes: Is it universally accessible? Is it electronic? Is it issued by a central bank? Is it moved around in a peer to peer way? A retail form of CBDC will have all four of the money flower attributes. It will be universally accessible, it will be electronic, it will be issued by a central bank and contain central bank liability, and it will transact in a peer to peer way. What is important to recognise is that most of the retail monetary base is not central bank money, it's commercial bank money. For example, when you deposit money at you bank it is likely that a large part of your fiat currency is with a claim against your commercial bank. Then through a set of mechanisms that claim is insured by potentially a central bank or a federal institution. The only claim that retail can have against a central bank is in the form of cash. Cash of course is a tiny percentage of the total amount of money individuals have. What CBDC does is takes that cash liability, in a retail context, to exist in a digital context in a way that's accessible to anyone. The question is what happens to individuals who do not have a smart device, or electricity, or WIFI? In addition, how is universal accessibility attained to individuals with disability issues or are elderly? There are a number of technical solutions that can help to lower this barrier but it is one that is a challenge in terms of the last mile for reaching ubiquitous CBDC. In the case of wholesale, the case for CBDCs is to broaden the base of digital currency from tier one institutions that are regulated domestically to fintechs, startups and perhaps banks in other jurisdictions. So, it's really extending the promise and the capability of central bank money.   Privacy Why is cash private? There isn't actually a mandate for money to be private. The fact that cash is private is a consequence of the technology. Cash however isn't always private. For example, purchasing a house in only cash cannot be done in a private privacy manner. Daniel makes the important point that CBDC will promote more privacy than digital payments of today that are motivated by commercial interests....

Leandro Nunes, Vice President, Product Development and Innovation at Mastercard, joins us to share how he leveraged Mastercard's DNA in scalability, payment automation and governance. We also discuss the important of a data governance model and his top tips for building scalable blockchain solutions.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that uses a consensus methodology to immutably record blocks in sequence in a ledger. It's a technology that is driven by data governance. The governance is on the data side not necessarily on the blockchain. Data governance looks at the question of ownership of the data, who has visibility over it and the rights for sharing it. It allows for the creation of networks to tackle use cases where the participants can integrate their systems in a decentralised environment where they can share the data. This provides the visibility to increase the trust between the participants. Leandro also stresses what blockchain is not. It's not the saviour of the world and shouldn't be a solution looking for a problem. As any other technology blockchain needs to connect and be integrated with other solutions such as AI, IoT, payments and others.   Mastercard's DNA – network builder When talking about blockchain there is this dependency on how to build and manage a network for different participants. In some ways these challenges are similar to the one of payment networks like Mastercard who has the established the credibility of having the global coverage, the need to scale, and acts as a neutral network builder not taking any sides. It is this element which is within their DNA. It is this DNA which can be leverage to build and gain adoption to new technologies such as blockchain. When you swipe your Mastercard within two seconds the user gets an approved message. Within those two seconds a lot of things happens amongst many participants to make sure the settlement is done.   Mastercard provenance solution Mastercard's Provenance Solution, is essentially an API layer on top of a Mastercard blockchain that serves as an orchestration hub for an entire ecosystem of partners. It bridges the supply chain traceability events with a payments network. This enables to share supply chain related data to inform the decision making process for the payment side. Decisions can be automated which in turn reduces the reconciliation costs, dispute resolution and speeds up the entire process. Leandro stressed that they're not a tech company trying to sell blockchain. They use blockchain as a technology, the value they can bring in addition to combining supply chain traceability along with the payment side is around bringing scalability to the governance. Working with their partners to answer the questions of how do you build a network where you can be neutral within its governance structure? How do you create a governance where you don't take sides?   Use case: Australian farmers In August 2021, Cirralto, the B2B payment services business, announced it is leveraging the Mastercard Provenance Solution, and the Fresh Supply Co digital supply chain network, to provide Australia's farmers with better access to trade finance. The WTO estimates between 80% and 90% of global trade relies on trade finance, yet there is a $1.5 trillion gap between the market demand and supply for trade finance. Financial institutions usually don't want to lend money to a small supply chain company that they don't know. However when you bring traceability, you bring blockchain and you increase visibility and trust these financial institutions realise they can use this data to reduce their risk assessment to make better lending decisions. Cirralto brings the fintech side, along with local lenders in Australia, to Fresh Supply Co supply chain network who brings the traceability platform and sharing the data with the Mastercard provenance solution.

Alisa DiCaprio, is the Head of Trade and Supply Chain at R3 and also facilitates a lot of R3's research. Whilst the concept of governance is familiar to many in the business community it has proven to be quite a challenge to blockchain business networks. In this podcast we discuss with Alisa, her latest research paper on the future of enterprise blockchain governance and collaboration. We cover some of the design and implementation of new business and technical models that will ensure that your blockchain journey is a success.   What is blockchain? For Alisa, blockchain is just a database but what makes it different from other databases is that it's decentralised that is global accessible. Like other digital technologies, blockchain requires the same adjustments to the global and commercial infrastructure.   Discussing the future of governance and collaboration In July 2021, Alisa published a white paper entitled “The Future of Governance and Collaboration”.  R3 began itself as a banking consortium and thus gained from the get go experience on how to build and manage consortiums.  A lot of their consultations with companies building on Corda was about how do you manage a consortium? What they realised is that when projects go wrong it often is not because of the technology but because of the decision making process that doesn't work or something with regards to governance. So, the white paper was an effort to set out the different examples of where governance has worked and all the different choices that need to be made. It sets out the policies that need to be thought of, it defines what is governance, and the questions that need be asked when building on blockchain technology.   What is governance? Governance refers to the processes and the rules that determine how a system makes decisions as it evolves. It is something that needs to be thought of as early as possible as it establishes the core capability for a sustainable business network to last from its inception to the future.   Are aspects of governance unique to blockchain? In legacy technologies there are well defined areas for adjudication when things go wrong. As blockchain is a new technology it doesn't have those well defined adjudication history nor a long lasting legal infrastructure. A lot of today's rules and regulations don't apply to blockchain, so for this reason, governance becomes very critical. It contributes to its reputation as a technology that works.   Why do blockchain projects fail due to governance? For Alisa, there are two types of characters that are early blockchain builders: Entrepreneurs Established businesses that may have an innovation fund or some money to play with Entrepreneurs who build on blockchain are usually new to the technology and are not necessarily thinking about establishing a governance structure. Established businesses which could be large companies or existing consortiums who are building on blockchain have an existing governance structure and they assume that it will work with blockchain and it doesn't always.   How do traditional business networks differ from blockchain business networks? Traditional business networks differ from blockchain business networks in three ways: Consortiums are considerably more common in the setup of blockchain business networks. The reason for that is because blockchain allows to innovate on a sector wide level rather than just a business level Blockchain business networks take a lot longer to implement than traditional business networks and also to change. Part of the reason is because it's so new that it is unclear what the regulatory infrastructure is. You may need to establish a rulebook if the legislative component does not exist. And of course, there is a business culture change with suddenly the need to operate in a decentralised way. The role of the business network operator becomes a lot more important that it is in traditiona...

IDunion is a new European decentralised identity management platform that is promising to bring user centric digital identity with privacy at its core. In this podcast we had Adrian Doerk – Product manager at Lissi and communication & Public relations at IDunion, walk us through IDunion.   What is blockchain? For Adrian, blockchain is just a data structure. When you expand its definition from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective with multiple nodes on a network what makes it interesting is whether the rights to writing on the network are permissioned or permissionless. This is determined by the type of consensus that exists on the network who determines who and what is written into the network.   Present challenges with digital identity History of the digital identity on the internet: Isolated siloed identity where users would login and authenticate themselves with the provider of a digital identity for accessing a service Federate identity where multiple companies and institutions got together and agreed on a single sign on for multiple sites. However, the challenges of this model is that the identity was still focused on a central operator and not all companies and institutions where comfortable with this approach User centric identity where a classic example is login with Google login or Facebook login. Whilst this is very convenient for the user it does lock up the user in a proprietary ecosystem which is very dangerous since these providers live from user and behavioural data which they resell to third parties. The next generation of digital identity will be designed with privacy by design principles. It will be a user centric proposition that is both convenient but also gives the user more control around their identity for authentication and identification purposes. Identification asks: who are you? Authentication asks: is it you again?   IDunion vision IDunion is a consortia, whose aim is to build an open ecosystem for self sovereign identities controlled by its user. Whilst the platform can be used everywhere it is based on European values, laws and regulations. Everyone (including natural as well as legal persons and things) has the possibility to manage their identity information by themselves and to decide when they want to share this information with whom. The sovereignty over one's own data is tremendously important, especially when it comes to very sensitive and personal information. Users can choose one of several wallets, which are used for storing and presenting credentials to third parties as required. This is helpful for a wide range of use-cases and enables a new way of identity management. Thus, technology companies are no longer acting as a central identity manager, but the user himself! The user can decide where the information can be seen, which program is used to manage information and with whom this information is shared. We call this concept the self-sovereign identity.   IDunion platform IDunion uses Hyperledger as a kind of technical umbrella for their multiple implementations: Hyperledger Indy for the implementation of the network Hyperledger Aries for the agents which communication with the network Hyperledger Ursa for the crypto libraries   Governance IDunion initiative was started by a number of German stakeholders and early on received some funding from the German government. The newly founded IDunion organisation will act as the legal entity behind the network and represent the stakeholders' interests within a European Cooperative Society (Societas Cooperativa Europaea S.C.E.). In addition to operating the network, the organisation's main tasks will be to attract new partners and to bring together partners working on the same or similar use cases. This ensures that all European participants are put on a level playing field. The participants in the network have defined rights and obligations to enable leg...

Jim Nasr, is the CEO of Acoer, a software development company whose vision, and work is all about building useful, usable, real time technologies that are fundamentally targeted at the healthcare industry. Jim was the former chief software architect at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States. In this podcast we discuss how NFTs and blockchain can be used to empower individual's consent.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a public infrastructure that should be used within the public context. Blockchain provides transparency, auditability and accountability. Blockchain is a layer of trust that can be used to impute trust between parties who don't trust each other. Jim is keen for blockchain to move past the world of cryptocurrencies and proof of concepts. He wants to make blockchain as practical as possible with real practical solutions.   Challenges of consent Consent is an element of compliance. In the healthcare industry, when you go see your GP, you fill out paperwork to essentially give them consent to your medical health information for all time. For Jim there are a number of issues with that. It's wrong that the patient doesn't always fully comprehend what they're signing, the process is complicated, it has to be done multiple time and the patient has no rights to say they've changed their mind. Jim gives the example that “if you're my orthopaedic surgeon, you should not have access to my mental health information”. There is a double challenge with regards consent. On one side individuals who sign consent forms have no idea what they have exactly signed, what data is shared and where that agreement is. On the other side organisations have limited idea on who signed what agreements, what data was covered and where the agreements are stored. This creates repetition of the process where the individual is repeatedly asked to sign new consent forms. Dynamic consent is the recognition that consent is not a and done concept, it is more dynamic with potential multiple phases for providing consent with the ability to revoke the consent, where the consent may expire after a certain amount of time and where it could be renewed. Dynamic consent is digital which gives it properties to be tracked and monitored.   Data dignity Data has creators like individuals on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to name a few who create data on those platforms. Essentially, we are implicitly giving those platforms the ability to use this data and along the way we become the product for the “free usage” of that platform. Consumer of those platform are creating content for the platform to leverage in a manner that creates a financial windfall for themselves. The issue is that we as consumers have no say in how that data is marketed and no say on whether firms like Cambridge Analytica use our data and create secondary data markets for themselves.   Regulation: GDPR & CCPA Regulation such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) provide an important opportunity for regulators to help regulate consent. GDPR gives EU citizens the right to grant access to their information to third parties, including consent and gives them the right to be forgotten. Crucially this regulation carries some serious teeth where the financial penalties for firms who breach GDPR regulation is up to 4% of gross revenue. For example Google has received a fine of €50m, British Airways of €22m and Marriott International of €20m. CCPA is very similar to GDPR in terms of the protection it provides to consumers, in terms of consent and in terms of being fined if firms don't comply. In the healthcare industry there is the Cures Act which gives patients the legal right to get access to their health data from their electronic health record irrespective of the type of app they're using.   Components of consent There are multiple components to a consent.

In January 2020, 12 global pharmaceutical companies and 17 public and private entities; including technical, legal, regulatory, academia, research organisations and patient representative organisations, got together to form PharmaLedger, the pharmaceutical blockchain consortium. Joining us for this podcast is Daniel Fritz, PharmaLedger Industry Project Leader and Supply Chain Domain Architect at Novartis and Marco Cuomo, Manager Applied Technology Innovation at Novartis, a team that brings in new technologies, such as blockchain, into Novartis. Marco is also the co-lead architect at PharmaLedger for the blockchain platform.   What is blockchain? Daniel likes to introduce blockchain with the five A's: Assets, too often blockchain is associated with cryptocurrencies as assets but assets can also be data and medicinal products that can be exchanged on a distributed ledger technology Audit, the immutability aspect of blockchain is good for audit. Automation, use of smart contracts eliminate non-value adding steps Anonymize, especially important in the healthcare care industry to protect the patient's data by keeping it confidential and protecting their privacy Authority, no central authority where authority is distributed amongst the participants For Marco the real strong added value blockchain provide at its core is the immutability function. Whatever you store on the blockchain, transactions and data are immutable so no one can change it.   An introduction to PharmaLedger PharmaLedger, launched in January 2020 as a public private partnership under (IMI) the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a joint undertaking between the European Union and the (EFPIA) European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations. It's a three project with over €22m of public private funding. There are 29 partners in the consortium which includes 12 pharmaceutical companies whose goal is to accelerate blockchain adoption. Its aim is to prove that this technology can bring value to patients, increase trust amongst all of the different ecosystem stakeholders and enable new capabilities around supply chain clinical trial and health data. In addition it aims to demonstrate that blockchain can address some of the key challenges the industry has around identity and governance. The whole idea of the IMI is actually about building consortiums to address problems or challenges that are too risk for any one company or too expensive for any one company and which would benefit from having public partnerships.   PharmaLedger use cases PharmaLedger has launched with 8 use cases broken down into three domains: Clinical trials Health data Supply chain Within the supply chain domain, you have two versions of supply chain traceability: clinical supply and finished good traceability. There is electronic project information (ePi) which is also known as an e-leaflet, or an e-patient information leaflet. It's a digital version of the leaflet you find in a medicine box. It contains the latest approved version of that leaflet in a manner that preserves the patient's privacy. In the future it will have the capability to send out recall notification, if there was a quality issue of that product, to send updated product information and also to apply some additional checks on the provenance of that medicine to help reduce the risk of counterfeits. On the clinical trial side, they have eRecruitment which is clinical trial recruitment so that patients can share their health profile and be matched through an algorithm to open clinical trials. Clinical trial eConsent aims to reduce the very administrative process for agreeing to undergo procedures and processes for any clinical trials. Clinical trial for IoT devices is for getting data from devices. Personalised medicines is putting it all together with some advanced digital technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help predict what ki...

Arnoud Star Busmann, CEO of MineHub and Carl Wegner, CEO of Contour join us in this exciting podcast to discuss their cross blockchain ecosystem collaboration. Arnoud and Carl share their insights on how to identify opportunities for cross ecosystem collaboration based on customer overlaps and data to ultimately build an experience that will delight the customer.   What is blockchain? Carl's definition of blockchain, within the context of distributed ledger technology, is a way of managing multiple databases and keeping that data where they overlap is in sync. You have a set of consensus mechanisms to manage agreements between the multiple databases, a communications protocol and a rules-based system for them to work. Arnould's definition of blockchain is one of a data infrastructure that provides a shared single source of truth that is distributed across an ecosystem. The responsibility for maintaining the shared truth maintained by a neutral, unbiased machine or machines. The data is owned by the data owners but the truth is controlled by none of them. The governance model of data is really the crux of blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology in Arnould's opinion. ERP 2.0, it's the ecosystem resource planning, building the apps and solutions that create value across an ecosystem instead of just one enterprise on the basis of that shared data.   Challenges MineHub addresses In the mining and metals industry there are many parties involved in post trade management of physical commodity transactions and across general supply chains. The multiple parties have a tendency to collaborate and coordinate themselves via email, sending PDFs or couriering paper documents. So, by the time that information is reconciled and acknowledged to be true, the cargo is already discharged or financed. There are a number of challenges with this approach in the sense that it is easy to manipulate, hard to trust for important business decisions making such as credit decisions, stockpile optimization, purchasing, pricing and compliance. The worst problem according to Arnoud, is that the valuable information has a tendency of being locked up in courier bags or boxes. World Economic Forum White paper: “digital transformation is estimated to generate more than $320 billion of value in the metals and mining industry over the next decade, including $77 billion” MineHub ensures that its users have high quality information, reliable information about the most important risks and opportunities in their daily work available in real time MineHub has developed its platform on HyperLedger Fabric. However, it is on their roadmap to go multi-ledger because they have a requirement to have a single reliable source of truth with data privacy and data residents.   Challenges Contour addresses Contour was previously known as Voltron before they rebranded. Trade finance is a very paper intensive industry where information is being couriered back and forth. Goods are arriving before the paperwork gets there thus making credit decisions harder to make or slower. Contour focuses on one aspect of trade finance which is a letter of credit, which is where a buyer and seller have some trust issues between each other. The buyer doesn't want to pay for something that he didn't want, whilst the seller doesn't want to ship and let go of his stock until he's sure he's going to get paid. They both use their banks to act as intermediaries to effectively manage the trust. That trust is managed by moving documentation between buyer and buyer's bank and seller and seller's bank and back and forth. Contour facilitates all four parties ability to see information at the same time. All four parties can join one ecosystem to support a letter of credit between them using one platform, an R3 Corda platform, instead of potentially four and Contour allows transparency and veracity of information between the parties.

Asset tokenisation has become one of the most prominent use-cases of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in financial markets, for assets including securities, commodities and other non-financial assets. For this podcast we had Iota Nassr, Economist and Policy Analyst at the OECD, join us to discuss her recent OECD report on the tokenisation of assets and their potential implications for financial markets. Iota started working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and at Citigroup before joining the OECD for the last 9 years working for the committee on financial markets. The committee has set up an expert group on financial digitalisation which includes representatives of central banks, finance ministries, treasuries and other financial authorities from the 38 OECD members. The group looks into Fintech related matters in financial markets and their policy implications including the area of blockchain in finance.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology, that records information in a distributed manner, in an immutable, time stamped and programmable manner that allows for the exchange of value without the need for a trusted central authority or without the need of intermediaries. This allows for efficiency gains on the back of such disintermediation.   Tokenisation of assets and potential implications for financial markets – OECD report On the 17th of January 2020, the OECD published the “Tokenisation of assets and potential implications for financial markets” report. Since 2018, the OECD committee on financial markets had been working on blockchain related issues. What kicked it off was the ICO (initial coin offering) hype, which the OECD looked at for their potential for SME financing in a report entitled “Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) for SME Financing ”. With the drop in ICO hype the committee continued to have an interest on the potential of tokens and tokenised markets post ICO, particularly on their potential proliferation in the technique of tokenisation would affect traditional financial markets. What they were really looking at is a theoretical environment where tokenized assets and market for tokenized assets take off. If that were to happen, how would it affect financial markets? And what do policymakers need to know and think ahead of that? That was the initial objective of the tokenisation of assets report they published in January 2020.   What is tokenisation of assets? The report looks at tokens from two perspective: (1) tokens representing a pre-existing real asset and (2) tokens “native” to the blockchain. The firsts case has tokenisation as the process of representing in a digital way by using the DLT an asset that already pre-exists. The tokens exist on the chain and carry the rights of the assets that they represent. They effectively act as a store of value for something that exists in the physical world. In the second case, we have native tokens which are built directly on the chain and live exclusively on the distributed ledger. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or payment tokens are examples of native tokens which derive their value in of themselves and are defined by their existence on the blockchain. The difference between the two is that in the first case the real assets on the back of which tokens are issued, continue to exist in the off-chain world. In the case of physical real assets, those would need to be placed in custody as to ensure that the tokens issued are constantly backed by those real assets. In the second case the issue of custodianship or third parties securing the existence of the tokenised asset does not exist. The role of the custodian in the first case is quite important because they are here to ensure that the real assets continues to exist off chain, that the characteristics of the asset correspond to the characteristics that are assigned to the token issued and to ensure that there is no se...

Harry Behrens – bloXmove co-founder. Harry was until recently the Head of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory where they built a mobility blockchain platform. Harry describes himself as a software guy. Now, along with his co-founder Sophia Rodiger, he has performed a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform which is the core of what bloXmove will be bringing to the market. In this podcast we discuss how bloXmove will enable building an open mobility ecosystem.   What is blockchain? Harry defines distributed ledger technology (DLT) as way for independent parties to keep a shared set of truthful facts of transactions they conduct amongst each other. It is a peer to peer system that facilitates trusted transactions between trustless parties, where they can trust the distributed ledger to reflect the reality of the business relationships between them.   From Daimler Mobility Blockchain to bloxMove One of the many uniqueness of this startup is that of the four founders, two of them are women with the CEO being a woman named Sophia Rodiger, who also comes from the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform. The Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform is a blockchain project at Daimler Mobility AG whose aim is to sustainably optimize booking and invoicing processes for mobility solutions. Non-native electric automakers, where native electric being Tesla for example, are facing serious transformations, in additions to the challenges of COVID19. Daimler for example is doing a form of demerger of all its entities where the truck unit is being separated from the passenger car unit and its financial arm is being split into two. In such times Daimler, like any other business, needs to focus on its core business. Thus, no matter how promising the mobility blockchain platform could be for Daimler or Daimler mobility it isn't core business. The platform was production ready and was ready to be “unleashed” as Harry describes it. However, as the platform was built for ecosystem, he believes that any big player with a very strong brand name will never be able to build an ecosystem because it won't be able to attract the other brands to its ecosystem. For example, Daimler wouldn't be able to attract Toyota, BMW or Tesla to join the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform. Thus, the only way to do a platform game, to go into platform economics based on software can only be done via a perceived neutral entity.  A platform branded as the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform will never be able to become the platform for shared mobility or urban mobility. It was thus agreed that Sophia and Harry will perform a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform via bloXmove with the help of venture capital funding from players such as Outlier Ventures. “By granting the software license, we want to make it possible for the platform to be used for other areas of application and thus to reach its full potential. I am very pleased that our successful pilot project is now being continued and further developed at bloXmove,” says Carmen Roth-Schäfer, CTO Daimler Mobility AG. BloXmove being this independent third party is now able to build on this mobility blockchain platform and build a mobility ecosystem to revolutionise the way urban mobility is conducted.   Changes to the mobility industry About 5 years, Harry shares, that the automotive industry started looking into an analysis of the upcoming megatrends such as “CASE” (Connected, Autonomous, Service/Software, Electrification), development towards smart cities, environmental consciousness and avoiding congestion in the big cities. Mobility as a service is increasingly growing as large cities are increasingly becoming congested and cities are in turn trying to reduce the number of vehicles in them by adding congestion charges and reducing parking spaces. Cars are increasingly becoming internet connected computer on wheels with higher degre...

Souleima Baddi is the CEO of Komgo, an innovative platform that powers trade networks. In this podcast we discussed the challenges of bringing blockchain to the trade finance industry. Souleima shared her insights on how to manage the need to bring user value immediately whilst dealing with both tech and user issues for adopting blockchain. How do you manage IT and security departments conventional ways of vetting a new platform whilst gaining the trust of traders accustomed to using email and paper processes for the last decades? Souleima is a banker, having spent 18 years with Société Générale, of which the last 10 years were in Geneva launching their commodity finance business. She's also a passionate mum of three kids.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger. It is a shared and synchronised database across multiple participants, that enables the recording of interactions and transfer of information, such as identity or values like money and securities, between two parties without the need for a centrally coordinating entity. Komgo uses DLT to create a digital audit trail of documents which strongly mitigates the risk of hampering the document or using the document multiple times for fraudulent purposes.   Trade finance industry challenges One of the main challenges of this industry has been its usage of paper based process for such a long time. There has been an acceleration of digital transformation that has increased due to COVID. However, transforming an industry does take a lot of time. Individuals are not easily willing to change their way of working, their routines, to invest in change management and put extra effort to adopt new processes. Komgo has more than 150 companies using its platform on a worldwide basis. Souleima recognises that for companies using any new software is a huge investment in terms of time and energy before it brings added value to the company. Teams within companies are swamped with their everyday job with their execution and it is extremely challenging for them, despite their goodwill, to embrace digitisation on top of everything else. The good news is that the trade finance industry recognises that digitisation is an absolute must and that it will play a major role in the future of the industry. The players who move too slowly in embracing digitisation will lose their competitive edge to others who are faster at it.   Komgo Komgo is an industry initiative with 20 shareholders from corporates and financial institutions who have merged forces to build a solution that matches the needs of the industry from both sides. Komgo is a software development company incorporated in Geneva in 2018 whose vision is to bring workings solutions to clients that helps them execute more trades, faster and in a more secure manner. Komgo, offers fours solutions to the market: Konsole: streamline trade finance – structured and authenticated messaging to issue secure banking instructions Market: optimize liquidity & manage risk – harmonized data and transactions to enable better choices Check: simplify onboarding & renewal – a single source to accelerate KYC Trakk: keep track of document trails – build unique documentary audit trails to guard against fraud and falsification   Konsole Konsole allows banks and corporates to connect together in an authenticated structured exchange around the full lifecycle of trade finance instruments. Souleima provided an example where corporates can discuss between them and agree on the draft of a letter of credit which they can push it to their banks. There is no need to create new chains of interactions, it goes from opening the issuance, the amendment and the presentation of the document to the settlement of the letter of credit. In addition there are automated flows between Konsole and the client's internal systems so that data flows from the eCRM of the trader can move through the platform to the back ...

Chaim Finizola is the ClaimShare Director and the head of business development for emerging markets over at IntellectEU. In this podcast we discuss ClaimShare’s confidential computing solution built on top of R3’s Conclave and Corda Enterprise platform for the detection and prevention of “double dipping” fraud in the insurance industry which runs in the several billions of dollars each year.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a technology that allows different actors to collaborate with each other without having to trust each other. Having a database in the form of a distributed ledger you can have not only the data decentralised, but also the way the data is handled in a decentralised manner. Independent of the discussion of centralised versus decentralised, Chaim reminds us what is important is to focus on the business use case and then determine the best approach.   What is confidential computing Confidential computing allows different actors to perform private computations on specific data sets and process data without other actors being aware of each other and without them being able to see what data is being processed. The party that is hosting this black box whether it’s a regulator or a network operator they can’t see what is being processed within the black box. An example of such a black box is the Intel SGX chip which has enclaves where the data can be processed in a fully confidential way without revealing any data to external parties. Insurblocks recorded a podcast with Richard Brown, CTO at R3 entitled "Confidential computing - introduction to R3's Conclave". “Double Dipping” Fraud KPMG has estimated that detected and undetected fraud make up between 5% to 10% of insurers’ total claim payouts. “Double-dipping” fraud a key contributor to fraud, costs the insurance industry several billion dollars each year, which inevitably leads to higher household insurance costs Double dipping happens when one actor for one loss event goes to multiple insurers to request a same payout. For example, a customer whose had a car accident will go to insurers A, B and C to get a payout from each one of them. This is quite a large problem for insurers which today has been extremely hard to detect. Insurers are usually unaware of this problem as they do not have a way to detect if their customer are insured with another insurer and if a payout has been made on a claim or not. There has been attempts by insurers to share information via a centralised database but that came up with a number of complexities from a regulatory standpoint and from a GDPR one. In addition, centralised databases run the risk of getting hacked or of leaked sensitive information.   IntellectEU IntellectEU are the developers of the ClaimShare solution. The firm was founded over 15 years ago as an integration company in the payment sector. They have done over 400 integrations, mainly with SWIFT, in addition to other payment rails. Since 2014 they have been working with DLT and were the first to perform a SWIFT to Ripple integration. In the blockchain space, IntellectEU has been working first with Ripple, then with Ethereum and in 2016 they were one of the founding members of Hyperledger. Since 2017 they have been working closely with R3 Up to now they have been working with 40 capital market, insurance and telco projects for using blockchain and emerging technologies such as AI, confidential computing and quantum computing.   ClaimShare Chaim introduced ClaimShare is the first platform that allows the detection and prevention of double dipping fraud in the insurance industry. ClaimShare uses blockchain technology to allow the sharing of public information to match data and match claims based on colour, location and date, for example. They then use, confidential computing part to match sensitive data of the claims that can be the named user, their address and birthdate.

Charles Kerrigan – Partner & Global Head of Fintech at CMS. Charles spends his time looking at what do new technologies mean for the industries that their clients work in from financial institutions to fintechs, crypto firms, and blockchain protocols. In this podcast we take a comprehensive look at NFTs and their impact on the financial industry, on property, transferability and ownership within legal frameworks.   What is blockchain? Charles gives us a lawyer’s definition, where he sees blockchain as both a puzzle and a challenge. To explain that he gave us an example, where is cryptocurrency property as defined under a legal system in English law. Property can be categorised into two buckets: Real property, is tangible and is something that can be touched. Intangible property: Shows in action, is essentially everything else where you can bring an action in relation to it, i.e. that you can sue in court for it. When Bitcoin arrived, it wasn’t something that can be touched and thus could be considered as an intangible property. However intangible property has been defined over the centuries as something that you can sue under a contract. Bitcoin thus isn’t either an intangible property nor a tangible one. The theft legislation talks about depriving someone of property, so bitcoins not property, you can't steal it. In November 2019 Sir Geoffrey Vos, Chancellor of the High Court came to the conclusion. That crypto-assets have all the legal indicia of property and are, as a matter of English legal principle to be treated as property. There are two primary reasons: First, the novel features of some crypto-assets, such as intangibility, cryptographic authentication, use of a distributed transaction ledger, decentralisation, and rule by consensus, do not disqualify them from being property. Secondly, they are not disqualified from being property either because they can be regarded as pure information, or because it might not be possible to classify them as being things in possession or things in action Taking the above points into consideration for defining blockchain, Charles explains that blockchain identifies value, it establishes certainty of ownership and is able to transfer value with certainty.   NFTs – Non Fungible Tokens NFTs provide the opportunity to identify ownership in a digital context and that has value in itself. A lot of present and historical legal disputes around commercial law are with regard to disputes over ownership. A person acquires a piece of property from another person, not through a valid transfer, whether it's via theft or mistake, or anything, that means that Person A has lost an asset, Person B has gained an asset in a way that's invalid. So far, we've got an easy case, because Person B should give it back to Person A. The hard cases come from variations of when Person B, hands it on to person C in exchange for some value. So now you've got A out of pocket, and C out of pocket, and B disappears whether physically or financially where they become insolvent. We've now got a dispute between A and C, neither of whom are at fault. But both of whom are arguing that they should have this asset returned to them. NFTs provide an immutable, searchable register in terms of who is the owner of a piece of property. Because NFTs are sitting on their own blockchain protocol such as Ethereum, they transfer their rights of ownership via an executable code. Two questions arise with regards what is being transferred: How to reconcile two registrars a real world asset registrar such as the Land Registrar in the UK with a NFT registrar? Where you don’t have a real world asset registrar for example in the UK, copyrights are not registerable. The protocol on which the NFT is minted and issued will purport to transfer rights, but it's not transferring rights and their copyright unless the copyright owner is party to that transaction

Joan Zerkovich – Senior Vice President, Operations at AAIS (American Association of Insurance Services) and Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger at the Linux Foundation join us to announce that the AAIS' OpenIDL is joining the Linux Foundation. In this episode we get an introduction to the AAIS, OpenIDL, the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger. We also discussed how OpenIDL will leverage the Linux Foundation unique approach to governance.   What is blockchain? Joan: distributed ledger technology is a technology that provides a way to have immutable records in the digital world, in a networked environment. Blockchain is used in a number of ways in addition to cryptocurrency, such as for business applications that require data security, privacy and an immutable record. OpenIDL uses blockchain to pursue a path of data security, privacy and transparency. Brian: blockchain is a shared system of record amongst participants in a commercial ecosystem. Brian, compares blockchain to the mid and late 90s when a group of folks were talking about free software and working on projects with no justifiable economic basis behind them such as the Apache Software project and the Linux project. Insurance have been conservative about adoption of new technologies, open source software and blockchain technology. However, Brian now thinks that insurers now see blockchain as solving some real problems, particularly problems created in understanding risk within a regulated environment. Blockchain helps organise an industry to solve a collective problem. A shared system of record, with automation through smart contracts is an essential part of solving these problems and doing that in an auditable and verifiable and, and regulatable way.   AAIS AAIS is a US based advisory organisation. In the United States, insurance is regulated at the state level. That poses some issues when you’re trying to offer insurance products nationally. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners or representatives from all the states got together and they said we need an organisation that can help them collect data on the insurance market and provide some perspective at the national level. They can use that data to develop products that can be filed in all 50 states to provide a common foundation for insurance companies to add value on top of that with some consistency across all 50 states. For the last 80 years AAIS has been authorised to collect data from the insurance carriers as an advisory organisation licenced in 50 states. AAIS is allowed to collect data that insurance companies wouldn’t be able to share between themselves due to antitrust concerns. AAIS uses that data to provide reports to the regulators and to develop products that they use.   Linux Foundation and Hyperledger 20 years the Linux ecosystem was composed of a number of open source contributors from RedHat, HP, IBM and thousands of other contributors. A consortium approach was set up as a home for the Linux project where the basic sustainability model was companies paying membership dues tiered by the size of the organisation. They weren’t pay for software development but paying for the coordination overhead, or as Brian calls it, the air traffic control function to all the different contributions coming in. After a few years there was a sense that this model was stable, that it was reliable and replicatable. The model was thus used for adjacent technology domains like cloud computing, software define networking and industry specific domains like automotive software. For each of these projects there is a clutch of companies who pay yearly membership dues to provide the core essentials, small staff to serve in that air traffic control function and coordinating functions. This has led to the creation of over 400 different projects. When Hyperledger started five years ago, it was started and continues to be managed in this kind of model where it has its ...

Shaun Frankson is the CTO and co-founder of the Plastic Bank. In this podcast we discuss Plastic Bank’s model and perform a deep dive on Plastic Bank’s blockchain and token platform. This is a great example of how blockchain can be used for social good.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a secure digital ledger that provides a trusted way for peer to peer data exchanges in an encrypted manner.   The Plastic Bank Plastic Bank transforms plastic waste into a form of currency to help create ethically sourced ecosystems where communities that collect this plastic receive an above market rate for it. Plastic Bank uses blockchain technology to work with some of the poorest communities in the world to offer them a digital ID and a digital savings account to provide them with financial inclusion. Plastic Bank’s message is if you have to use plastic ensure that it is plastic that was stopped from entering the ocean and that is used to improve lives and regenerate communities.   Tackling poverty Shaun explains that when you look at the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the first one is poverty. Poverty is the focal point of many other issues including ocean plastic. Plastic Bank uncovered that about 80% of ocean plastics comes from developing countries with almost no waste management systems. They recognise that by creating a business solution where recycling can be an earned income for anyone not as an endpoint in life but as a starting point to a better life, a starting point to education, career training that can provide for all the things a family needs, then this can address both the plastic problem and the poverty problem. When Shaun looked at bringing technology to bring financial inclusion to the poorest places in the world he came upon a number of problems: no phones, limited connectivity or data, and issues of illiteracy. They had to design a whole interface for first time illiterate person that’s never used a phone, without any reference to any technology and potentially lives somewhere with poor data connectivity. Plastic Bank designed a system where when they open up a new branch they give the local team a first phone where they can create accounts for non-phone holders upon verifying their ID and age. This will automatically create for them a digital ID and a digital wallet for them to receive the cash earned from the plastic they collect. Like that they can earn their first phone through this system and provide them with full access over their account.   Hitting the 1 billion plastic bottles milestone The Plastic Bank measured that it takes 50 bottles to reach 1 kilo of plastic. 1 billion plastic bottles resulted in 20 million kilogrammes of plastic waste that was prevented from entering the oceans. It took them 4 years to reach 500 million collected plastic bottles, this year to reach the next 500 million and in the next 12 months they expect to recycle well over another billion bottles worth of plastic. The Plastic Bank has a target, that by 2025, they will be becoming a billion dollar company, impacting a billion lives and preventing a billion kilos of plastic from entering the ocean every year.   Plastic Bank’s Blockchain Need for a digital reward programme where we can ensure that the right people get the right amount of reward. For example, how to ensure in a country like Haiti that you put millions of dollars into the country and ensure it goes to the right people in a safe manner. Whilst on the other side their client would want a system that is attack proof. They desire a system that is valid and legitimate. This is where blockchain becomes a valuable tool as it provides trust to the data, trust to the impact stats, and trust the right people in some of the poorest parts of the world would receive the right amount of money for their labour in collecting the plastic. IBM Montpellier’s blockchain team stepped in to provide support to Shaun’s tea...

Cindy Vestergaard is the Stimson Centre Director, Nuclear Safeguards Program & Director, Blockchain in Practice program. In this podcast we discuss the interesting work she does in safeguarding nuclear material with blockchain technology.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a subset of DLT, which is essentially a combination of a variety of different technologies that have been around for already a number of decades, such as peer to peer protocols, cryptography hashing, to make it an immutable ledger that can be shared securely, digitally, across the ecosystem.   The Stimson Centre The Stimson Centre is a think tank that was set up in 1989 by Barry Blechman & Michael Krepon at a time when the Cold War was ending shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a nonpartisan and independent centre that looks at real world problems. The work that Cindy’s team does is evidence-based policy research that sits at the intersection of technology and policy.   SLAFKA In 2019 a partnership was established between the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), the Stimson Centre in Washington, D.C., and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, to develop the world’s first distributed ledger technology (DLT) prototype for safeguarding nuclear material, called SLAFKA. Finland is the first country in the world to be building a deep geological repository for its spent nuclear fuel. STUK, its radiation and nuclear safety authority approached the Stimson Centre for helping them develop a prototype. The question for STUK and for the government of Finland needed to answer is how to ensure that the material underground is also the same that is reflected on the books above ground. Data integrity is very important. The other reason is concerning their relationship with Euratom, the regional safeguards body for the EU’s member states that ensures a regular and equitable supply of nuclear fuels to EU users. The objective is in increasing security, enhancing data sharing and transparency between STUK and Euratom. For the Stimson Centre, the opportunity, was to see if DLT can actually handle the different types of transactions that are needed under a nuclear safeguards agreement.   Data transactions and trust amongst parties From a data transaction perspective; nuclear material moves within a facility, within a country and internationally. As it moves it also shifts in form for example from yellowcake or uranium ore concentrates to enriched uranium. All these movements and change of state have to be logged and reported to either a national regulator or a regional regulator such as Euratom within the EU and then to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Today’s data transactions come in all shape and form both in terms of paper and in an electronic format. The IAEA has a portal for safeguards declarations but it isn’t universally used. Some countries still provide their declaration on a USB stick whilst others on paper. In the nuclear world there isn’t a lot of trust among different parties. The IAEA goes in to monitor and verify that what states are doing is actually meeting their obligations in using nuclear material for peaceful purposes. One of the reasons why the IAEA hasn’t launched a blockchain system is partly due to its stage of digitisation. International organisations such as the IAEA are the still the product of their member states. If member states are not willing to put money in certain thing then it takes a long time for them to happen.   Launch of the Proof of Concept (PoC) On the 10th of March 2020 the SLAFKA PoC was officially launched in Helsinki. The purpose of the PoC was to demonstrate can the DLT SLAFA prototype handle nuclear safeguard transactions? The answer was yes. The platform was able to demonstrate transactions: Shipping material within a country or outside of a country

Walid Al Saqqaf, Founder of Insureblocks and CEO & Co-Founder of Rebalance Earth joins us in this podcast to discuss the role blockchain has in fighting climate change but also the impact it can have in regenerating biodiversity. In a world that is increasingly threatened by the challenges of climate change, ecosystem destruction, and the 6th mass extinction, carbon credits and carbon offsetting markets seem ill equipped to face them. The markets are plagued by a lack of transparency and a number middlemen here to make a quick buck, can blockchain, AI and Internet of Things along with keystone species like African Forest Elephants provide an answer?   What is blockchain? Bruce Pon, co-founder of Ocean Protocol, mentioned blockchain as this “general purpose technology” like the steam engine during the industrial revolution. Now everyone will tell you that blockchain is a distributed database that removes the need for intermediaries and that has immutable or tamper proof properties. From the perspective of Rebalance Earth, Walid looks at blockchain from two perspectives, a short term and a long term one: On a short term it is a technology that allows for the transparent, traceable and trusted transfer of value, from firms and households wishing to rebalance themselves, to local communities that are here to safeguard keystone species like African Forest Elephants who perform the carbon offsetting services and the maintenance of whole biodiverse ecosystems.  All this in a transparent manner to avoid corruption and double counting. From a long term perspective, we all know today that biodiversity is important. However we don’t have enough data to understand how important it is, and crucially how much it’s worth. To get the necessary amount of data to begin to understand biodiversity you need a very large number of actors around the world to share their data. This is where blockchain can come in, in the creation of a data marketplace that will facilitate the share of data to unlock the value of biodiversity   Rebalance Earth Co-founded by startup founder, Walid Al Saqqaf, Assistant Director at the IMF, Ralph Chami, world renown conservationist Ian Redmond, along with 60 volunteers, Rebalance Earth is a purpose driven company whose aim is to re-imagine carbon offsetting as a mechanism to fund the protection of keystone species to promote and regenerate biodiversity. Other ecosystem services attributable to these species will follow as research reveals the value of their role in the ecosystem. Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth in all its form and all its interactions. A keystone specie is an organism that helps to define an entire ecosystem. It is one which has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its population size. If that species dies an entire ecosystem risks collapsing. Equally if a keystone specie is reintroduced into an ecosystem it can reflourish. This is the case of what happened in the Yellowstone National Park when 31 wolves were reintroduced into it in 1995. The company headquartered in the UK, uses nature-based solutions augmented with innovative technologies such as blockchain, AI (artificial intelligence), and IoT (internet of things) sensors to monitor the “client’s animals’” and manage the transfer of carbon offsetting dollars to local communities in Gabon.   The Kyoto Protocol The Kyoto Protocol was adopted on 11 December 1997. Owing to a complex ratification process, it entered into force on 16 February 2005. Currently, there are 192 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. In short, the Kyoto Protocol operationalizes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing industrialised countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual targets. The framework pledges to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentratio...

Silvia Attanasio, is the Head of Innovation at ABI (Italian Banking Association). Previously to that role she worked for 17 years at ABI Labs, the centre of research and innovation at ABI. Previously Silvia introduced us to Spunta, the private permissioned DLT project for interbank reconciliation. In this podcast she shares with us some of the work that ABI and its consortium of Italian Banks are looking to offer to the European Central Bank in its development of its CBDC called the Digital Euro.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a disruptive technology that can deeply transform the way we transact. It may add transparency and eliminate frictions in transactions. Blockchain is not a cost cutting technology. It is a technology that can bring some efficiency gains in due course. Blockchain technology can transform processes   Update on Spunta Silvia featured on Insureblocks on the 22nd March 2020 where she introduced Spunta, a private permissioned DLT project for interbank reconciliation. The new application streamlines and automates the reconciliation of transactions, improving governance of the overall Spunta process, a nostro vostro account, and moves from a slow error prone settlement system to a real time management of the reconciliation process. Today after three waves of migration, nearly 100 banks are in production operating the Spunta DLT daily. Each bank has its own DLT node, geographically distributed in nine different cities across the country processing 322 million transactions.   Introduction to Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) The term CBDC denotes money that a central bank could create in digital form and make available to the general public. It would not be another currency, it will be another form of the existing currency. In January 2021, The Bank of International Settlement ran an updated survey with central banks around world. In it they found that 86% of central banks are engaged in CBDC work. P from 80% in May 2020. Central banks representing 1/5 of the world’s population are likely to issue a retail CBDC in the next three years. The goal of improving financial inclusion is much more pronounced in emerging economies, while it is less present in advanced economies like European Union, where the main objectives are the security and efficiency of the payment system.   The Digital Euro The European Central Bank’s CBDC is called the Digital Euro. The ECV see’s three main benefits in exploring the possibility of launching a Digital Euro: Support digitisation for a native digital European economy Respond to the declining usage of cash as a means of payment. Tackling sovereignty concerns related to foreign private digital means of payments in the euro area or possible future foreign CBDC There are a few more benefits from the bank’s perspective that Silvia highlighted such as the possibility of enabling use cases based on the programmability of the currency, and the possible application to transactions from counterparties as a machine.   Preserving properties of cash, anonymity and privacy in a Digital Euro Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB stated that in a blog post: “Central to all our discussions is the fact that a digital euro would be a means of payment that would complement cash, not replace it. Abolishing cash is not on the table, as ECB President Christine Lagarde and other members of the ECB Board and Governing Council have stated publicly on several occasions.” With regards to anonymity. If the identity of Digital Euro users were not verified at any stage of a transaction then they would be anonymous and AML / CFT mechanisms (anti-money laundering / combating the financing of terrorism) wouldn’t be effective. Silvia believes that this would require at least a light identity verification when opening a digital wallet. However as the implementation of a Digital Euro may happen on a DLT platform it is possible to ensure...

Gary Storr, General Manager of Trust Your Supplier by ChainYard, explained to us some of the challenges that the supplier information management industry is facing with disparate sources of information and the role blockchain can help to mitigate them. In this podcast you will hear how Trust Your Supplier creates a trusted source of supplier information and digital identity that simplifies and accelerates supplier onboarding, lifecycle management and the seamless exchange of information.   What is blockchain? For Gary the best way to explain what is blockchain is what it isn’t. Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency, it’s a technology. It isn’t a programming language. Blockchain is a ledger that is organised in a sequence of blocks that are chained together. It is  distributed and it’s immutable. Blockchain is highly secure and decentralised, thus allowing for a multitude of participants to store information on the blockchain within the ledger. Security is assured by encryption and hashing technology making it impenetrable from current day hacking.   What is ChainYard? ChainYard is a subsidiary of IT People Company, founded by Sai Nidamarty, its CEO. IT People Company is essentially an IT staffing business that was started in 1999. IBM is a close partner to IT People Company, so when Sai noticed that blockchain was taking off he decided to spun off a new organisation called ChainYard with the intent for it to be a service organisation providing IT consulting services in and around blockchain. Within a few years of launching ChainYard, Sai recognised there was an opportunity to create commercial applications on blockchain to address serious needs within the enterprise, such as Trust Your Supplier. ChainYard is now a 5 years old organisation with 80 staff providing blockchain services and products.   Challenges of the supplier information management industry Supplier information management is about getting information on a supplier. It is essentially an identity question which blockchain is particularly good at with regards to establishing an identity and to protecting it. Traditional enterprises have traditional systems where identities are very segmented. It isn’t unusual for large supplier to have hundreds of identities within the system architecture. This is highly unmanageable. Systems could be storing, for a single identity, multiple versions of the truth for a contact with varying degrees of accuracy. Questions regarding data privacy are another issue. Coming out of an enterprise and looking at the market a supplier would want to have a single identity as it deals with a number of customers. Similarly to a driver’s license or to a passport you want a single identity to be used across the value chain. Consequently, there is an opportunity for efficiency, for speed, for reduction of cost, for reduction of risk and for compliance.   Trust Your Supplier (TYP) IBM, a partner of ChainYard, recognised that there were some pain points within its supplier information. Both IBM and ChainYard expressed the desire to leverage their respective blockchain expertise to tackle those challenges. Trust Your Supplier was thus born to tackle not just IBM’s supplier identity issues, its supplier qualification and lifecycle management issues but also those of enterprises across industries in a decentralised manner. Within its capacity as a partner IBM teams from TradeLens and Food Trust have contributed to the expertise and development of Trust Your Supplier. With Trust Your Supplier, every supplier is provided with an identity on a blockchain platform. Provide them with easy tools and applications for them to access and process that identity in a meaningful way. It allows organisation to discover, identify, qualify, on board and manage relationships with suppliers in a decentralised manner with a single version of the truth. Trust Your Supplier application is in production for the last 18 mon...

Christopher McDaniel is the President at the Institutes’ RiskStream Collaborative. In this podcast he announces the launch of Canopy 3.0 their latest version of their insurance blockchain platform. This new platform, built on Kaleido, supports Corda, Enterprise Ethereum and Hyperledger. Chris also shares with us his plans to launch first notice of loss in production mode on Canopy 3.0 this year.   What is blockchain? Since the launch of Canopy 1.0 in late 2017, Chris' view of blockchain has evolved. Back then when they were building Canopy 1.0 their views were that blockchain was fundamentally a sharing mechanism. There weren’t many applications out there so they had to build use cases and applications to demonstrate to the market what is possible. Now with the launch of Canopy 3.0 things have changed. GDPR, and the right to be forgotten, has had some impact on what you can and can’t do on a blockchain. There are now many parties building out solutions on blockchain compared to back in 2017. Whilst blockchain is still a sharing mechanism there is this realisation that you don’t need to put everything on the blockchain. You can store data off chain and link it to the blockchain via a validated hash. For Chris, blockchain is a great solution for verification, for trust and for facilitating sharing.   The Institute and RiskStream Collaborative The Institute, parent company of RiskStream Collaborative, is focused on education and certification in the insurance industry. Their flagship certification is the CPCU certification amongst another 20 certifications. Their reason for starting RiskStream Collaborative, is that the management at the Institute realised that emerging technologies such as blockchain, AI (artificial intelligence) and IoT (internet of things) are going to be key things they will need to teach and certify for insurance professionals in the future. Based on that they created RiskStream.   Canopy 1.0 Prior to creating Canopy 1.0 the Institute organised a working group for 30 insurers who wanted to find out more about blockchain. From that event three to four proof of concepts (PoCs) were set up on a public Ethereum blockchain. Some of the learnings they gained from that event was the need to build on a private blockchain. Canopy 1.0 was launched on a private Ethereum blockchain with proof of insurance as the one use case built on top of it.   Canopy 2.0 One of the key learnings that the team took out of Canopy 1.0 is that members of RiskStream Collaborative weren’t comfortable with the classic version of blockchain where everything is shared with everyone on the network. Whilst the information was encrypted and accessed on a permissioned basis it still had  trust issues along with legal and compliance ones as it was shared with everyone. Chris and his team looked for an alternative solution and identified R3’s Corda as it had a point to point approach instead of everything being shared across the blockchain. This was a critical success factor for the consortium’s members. Purist would argue that Corda isn’t a blockchain but a distributed ledger technology (DLT). Whilst this is true from a technical standpoint, the DLT solution provided the answers to the challenges they were facing. Canopy 2.0 was launched on a Corda Enterprise License with a number of use cases such as first notice of loss, proof of insurance and a number of other applications within commercial lines, workers compensation, certificates of insurance, surety bonds and a proof of concept for the placement process for reinsurance between brokers and reinsurers. Canopy 2.0 brought significant learnings including one where a number of customer needs and third-party solutions weren’t a natural fit for Corda and thus couldn’t be integrated into Canopy 2.0. GDPR along with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018 introduced some new challenges for blockchain.  Both presume the operation of the traditional d...

Pratap Tambe is the Head of BFSI Blockchain Consulting, UKI and Europe at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He has has 25 years of experience has been working in commercial insurance since 2011 and in blockchain with insurance since August 2015. In this podcast we discuss TCS partnership with B3i and how blockchain has evolved in the insurance industry since 2015.   What is blockchain? Pratap looks at blockchain more from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective. He uses an example where traditionally a transaction is sent to one or more web servers run by one party. Typically, one server validates that transaction, processes it and saves it. In DLT, a transaction is sent to multiple servers run by different parties which validate the transaction and together run a consensus process. Successful outcome of the consensus results in the transaction being processed and saved. In blockchain that transaction will be saved in a chain of blockchain which isn’t necessarily the case in DLT.   Tata Consultancy Services Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a 50 year old IT services company that is part of the Tata Group which has revenues of $106 billion. TCS has $22 billion worth of revenue from 470k global professionals that employs 36.4% women from a total of 147 nationalities.   TCS partnership with B3i for ecosystems innovations In November 2020, TCS partnered with B3i to design, develop and launch ecosystem innovations based on DLT for the insurance industry. Having worked in the London insurance market since 2011, Pratap is sharply aware of the difficulty competitors have in collaborating together. He believes that B3i has managed to launch a consortium blockchain of the ground with the participation of a number of those competitors. B3i has developed a strong product vision and technology which requires a strong system integrator (SI) partner like TCS. As an SI, TCS plays a key role in enabling and scaling consortium blockchains to succeed. TCS brings scaling up innovation, pipeline ideation and validation, product engineering, professional services and product support. These are natural services provided by a typical SI. TCS already works with many global insurers and reinsurers across geographies from providing IT services support. Because of these relationships TCS brings unique value in helping blockchain consortiums provide back end integration into the blockchain to their customers and partners. The role of the SI is to leverage its relationships to enable and support the baseline success of initiatives in core geographies of the blockchain consortium. Once that is achieved the SI is here to scale up innovation and delivery in core geographies and then to other geographies.   Ecosystems of ecosystems Insureblocks is a big fan of the notion of ecosystems of ecosystems. We perceive a future where we will see cross industry blockchain consortiums connecting and exchanging value between each other. For example, B3i could connect to PharmaLedger in the pharmaceutical space or to Marco Polo in the trade finance space. Pratap states that B3i connecting with other blockchain consortiums is part of the agenda. He also states that this fits well within TCS strategy of driving ecosystems whether or not they use blockchain. One current example that Pratap mentioned is asset or property data. The insurance industry has a lot of this kind of data in various formats and in varying quality of data. The insurance industry could cleanse this data, and leverage it with the appropriate consent to monetise this data to other industries. Another example of cross industry collaboration is for healthcare industry consortiums interacting with a healthcare ecosystem.   Blockchain in insurance since 2015 In August 2015, Pratap published an article entitled “Blockchains and London insurance market?”. Back then he was a great fan of the potential of blockchain.

Shermin Voshmgir is the author of the book Token Economy, the founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin. In the past she was the director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics which she also co-founded. She was a curator of TheDAO (Decentralized Investment Fund), an advisor to Jolocom (Web3 Identity), Wunder (Tokenized Art) and the Estonian E-residency program. In this podcast we discuss "How to design your own token system".   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a collectively maintained public infrastructure where people are incentivised to keep the ledger up to date in a trustful manner. It is the backbone of this new generation internet often referred to as the Web 3. Blockchain allows its participants to collectively settle data transactions, whether its value transactions or data flows on a shared public infrastructure that everyone can trust. This contrasts to today’s Web 2 which is managed by private client server infrastructure where data is managed and stored behind the walled gardens of a server that belongs to a specific institution or a private entity. Shermin believes that blockchain itself isn’t particularly interesting. What is interesting is that blockchain brought the back-end revolution for a decentralised web or Web 3. Tokens are the killer application of the Web 3 as websites were the killer application of the early internet in the 1990s when the World Wide Web came about.   Types of tokens Cryptocurrencies and crypto assets are specific type of tokens. A token can represent money, whether it’s state issued money, often referred to as CBDC (central bank digital currency) or virtual currencies such as cryptocurrencies. Tokens can represent any type of assets such as commodities, physical assets and fungible assets like art or real estate. Any virtual or real asset can be tokenized and have a digital representative that is easily traded. Tokens can also be used to represent an identity of a person, machine or an institution. Credential tokens are tokens that are tied to an identity or that have limited transfer abilities.   Token System A system is use to described how people and objects interact in this physical world. Token systems can have varying degrees of complexity. Usually, the more actors are involved in a system, the more complex the system and its interactive parts become. An example of a complex token system is the Bitcoin network which is a network of physical computers operated by humans or institutions. It has a three-layered network composed of tokens, machines, and peer-to-peer network. An example of a less complex system is a token system that represents tokenizing shares in a company which can be settled on a public or semi-public infrastructure.   Creating a token system, the questions When creating a token system the main questions that one should ask themselves are: What do you want to do? What is the purpose of your venture? For example, if you want to tokenize real estate, the question of how to design your token system is very different than if you want to create a token based social network where the token creation needs an intelligent incentive design for how to incentivize people to upload and curate posts. An example of such a token system is Steem. However, such token systems are very complex and have a lot of unanswered questions. Tokenising real estate whilst it involves a series of complex legal questions sits within an understood legal framework. Whilst they may seem less complex they can very easily become more complex where your individual real estate objects can be tokenised allowing for fractional tokenization of a single object, like an apartment. There is a series of technical, legal, economic and ethical questions to be asked when we design our token system, but the first question is always, what do I want to do?  

Sandbox Blockchain is Poland's first business and technology platform designed to accelerate the development of innovative blockchain solutions within an isolated system that simulates real world production environment. To take us through this innovative solution we are joined by Dorota Dublanka, President of the Foundation Cyberium and Head of Human Resources at KIR along with Maciek Jędrzejczyk, Blockchain Technical Leader at IBM for Central and Eastern European Region and lead architect of the blockchain sandbox. We discussed how the blockchain sandbox   What is blockchain? Dororta defines blockchain as a list of records that is stored on a wide range of computers. She also refers to blockchain as lego blocks where different participants join together to build a tower together whilst verifying each blocks added to the structure and exchanging information between each other. Maciek’s defines blockchain as a database with a very specific data structure whereby transactions are put together into a block representing an interval of time between the recording of a previous state and the current state which is going through the approval process. Each block is cryptographically linked to previous blocks and the governance over how the data is stored on the chain is determined by the network. The network decides whether or not certain transactions are going to be included within a block or not.   State of innovation within the financial sector in Poland Maciek states that to understand the state of innovation in the financial sector in Poland one has to go back 30 years to 1989 – 1990 when Poland transitioned to a market economy. At that time there was no digitisation and computers were virtually inexistent. The financial infrastructure was nearly all paper based. Everything had to be created from scratch which represented both a set of challenges and opportunities for Poland. Poland had virtually no technical debt, or legacy IT infrastructure  within its financial services sector that other countries in Western Europe or in North America had. This enabled the Poles to choose the best and most flexible solution to their specific needs. As the Polish leadership and society were very curious they were also very open to innovation. Dorota added that, Poland has a relatively high social acceptance for innovative solutions. Poland has one of the highest percentages of mobile banking and debit cards users in Europe. Because of its embracing approach to innovation, Poland has adopted a lot of the most innovative platforms for payment solutions and its IT professionals rank as some of the top 10 best in the world.   The Blockchain Sandbox Blockchain Sandbox is here to accelerate the development of innovative blockchain solutions in Poland. They aim to demystify what is blockchain and break the view that it’s only related to cryptocurrencies. They wish to develop blockchain technology to support entrepreneurs and companies to access solutions within the sandbox. Startups and major companies who join the sandbox with innovative ideas can leverage blockchain within the sandbox for developing their applications and business solutions. They will also receive support from the blockchain sandbox founding members. Foundation Cyberium is the leader of the Blockchain Sandbox. The founding members are PKO Bank Polski, KIR and IBM. PKO Bank Polski is one of the biggest banks in Central and Eastern Europe who has implemented production grade blockchain solutions. KIR is the hub of shared services for the Polish financial services sector. They build system solutions for the banking business and the government. KIR is one of the sandbox leaders and is implementing innovative solutions to the economy. IBM is the technology partner to the Sandbox initiative. Chmury Krajowej, the national cloud operator, responsible for sustaining the IT infrastructure for mission critical applications in in Poland,

Bernhard Lang, Member of the Board at MSG System, joins us to discuss innovation and blockchain in the insurance industry. In this podcast we discuss the importance for the insurance industry to remain relevant in an ever changing market. How making innovation a corporate discipline and embracing a customer centric approach to remain engaged in customer ecosystems is critical to that objective of relevance.   What is blockchain? From a non-technical point of view blockchain is a form of digital representation of what we naturally do in real life. We want to be part of social communities within which we communicate, make agreements, state facts, and make promises that are then known to the people within the community as a current status of things or an evolving collective truth. The technical definition of blockchain is that it’s an immutable and distributed technology that enables the creation of new business scenarios. According to Bernhard, too often blockchain technology is looked at from a technology angle first before a business one. He personally prefers that we start with a business problem and then identify blockchain technology if it is the right one for the business problem.   About MSG Bernhard Lang has been with MSG for the past 25 years. MSG is a German product based system integrator. MSG focuses on 10 different lines of business. Their business strategy is to develop industry specific content, software assets, software solutions, that go very deep into the lines of business along with a consulting services associated with it. The majority of MSG’s business is within insurance but also looks at other industry verticals such as banking, public sector, automotive and others. In addition, MSG works with startups such as Ritablock (featured on Insureblocks: Ep. 124 – Reinsurance accounting blockchain, Ritablock integrates with B3i’s Fluidity platform) and they have co-developed the SAP FS-RI (financial services reinsurance), which has become the market standard for professional reinsurance companies and for cedents. Outside of reinsurance, MSG has partnered with Marco Polo, a trade finance blockchain solution, to help them integrate with SAP European Systems.   Insurers approach to blockchain in comparison to mature platforms like SAP Bernhard believes the insurance industry is quite open to blockchain technology however he notes that the materialisation of previous blockchain investments haven’t been that great. Consequently he believes that in the future the insurance industry might be more cautious to making investments in blockchain. MSG has an innovation lab in Canada called Cookhouse Lab. In May 2017, they launched a four week design thinking blockchain workshop along with seven insurance companies where they identified 34 uses cases and created three prototypes. Whilst there was a lot if interest at that time, Bernhard would qualify the output as having had a limited impact and not significant enough to be considered a game changer. Whilst he believes insurers will keep looking at blockchain technology few will expect high returns.   Evaluating new innovative technologies within the insurance industry Bernhard candidly describes the decision making process within insurance companies as being sometimes irrational. To support that statement, he recalls a meeting regarding ACORD standards, which in his opinion represent a huge business case. During that meeting, insurance professionals flew in from around the world, agreed to join forces and create a service organisation. All participants were requested to make a €40,000 investment for this initiative. Unfortunately, they had great difficulties in raising that amount of money. Bernhard asks the question that if it was such an obvious use cases with large saving potentials why was it so difficult to raise such a small amount of money? For Bernhard the insurance industry sometimes makes irrational decisions when it doesn...

Mark McLaughlin is IBM’s Global Insurance Director, leading IBM’s Global Insurance strategy, solutions, and partnerships.  Mark’s teams analyse trends in the insurance business and in technology, predict strategies for insurers, and build IBM insurance solutions to meet insurer needs. In this podcast we discuss the challenges and opportunities of blockchain in the insurance industry with special insights from IBM.   What is blockchain? For Mark blockchain is a trusted shared ledger. It enables business entities with different interest and different goals, that may not 100% trust each other, to establish a common ground where a set of documents, processes and data is maintained by a group across a business network. It is maintained in a way that is immutable where everybody can see the changes that are going on and where everybody has a record of it. Blockchain also have features like smart contracts that can help automate business processes in a trusted manner by all participants. Mark points out that there are a lot of different things you can do with blockchain from digital currencies to running shared business processes.   How has insurance embraced blockchain technology? Mark believes insurers are feeling the heat on innovation due to the 46% CAGR on Insuretech investment and the entry of large players like Ping An and Amazon into online distributed type insurance ventures. Insurance being baked into other industries such as the purchase of an airline ticket in the US now comes with the offer of travel insurance as part of the process. The insurance industry knows that they have to figure out ways to connect to broader ecosystems and to innovate. Blockchain is one way of doing that. Whilst insurers have a high level of interest in blockchain they have had a little trouble getting started in some cases. Blockchain has great potential as a technology and an increasing number of insurers are willing to embrace it. The challenge however is with the business model. Other technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) do not have the same challenge. AI is very easy to visualise, it can be used to better process a claim, underwrite a risk and advise an insured. Blockchain is a little tougher. The challenge isn’t the tech it’s the use case behind the technology. Insurers who have been successful at using blockchain are those who have correctly defined the business value. It is however a very tricky exercise because blockchain is about creating networks and you have to ensure that the value line up across all the players within that network.   Digitising business during COVID There is a tonne of complexities in the insurance industry and people tend to stick to the process they know because they know how to manage the complexities within that process. However, some forward-thinking companies have during this COVID world looked at digital interactions and how they can rethink their business to leverage new technologies. For Mark, It is about “how do I build better interactions with my end user? How do I get closer to risk? How do I do a better job of providing personalised and customised advice around that risk? How do I connect relevant products and services at the point of risk?” Insurers that can figure that out and do that at scale will be the most successful ones in the future.   Approaches to innovation and blockchain Too often insurers judge innovation in its ability to sell more of their existing products. The more successful insurers are those that think “Instead of how do I take my existing policies and my existing business and adapt them, they think more about how do I reinvent the entire risk process?” Too often the decision making process insurers get caught up with is very short term instead of thinking more long term and the bigger picture. Connectivity to customer and connectivity to risk is very important for insurers according to Mark.

Dr. Denise McCurdy, Blockchain Governance Advisor at Grove Gate Consulting along with Tom Fuhrman, Blockchain & Cybersecurity Consultant at Vector MV, join us in this podcast to discuss the challenges of adopting blockchain from a governance and risk standpoint. Denise is a blockchain governance advisor who has written a doctoral dissertation on blockchain with a special focus on supply chain and governance. She’s also the VP of blockchain governance for a supply chain and logistics startup. Tom Fuhrman is a blockchain & cybersecurity consultant specialised in cybersecurity consulting for the last 25 years. Recently he has extended his scope into blockchain consulting, where he focuses on strategy, governance, risk management, and specifically looks at the intersections between blockchain and cybersecurity.   What is blockchain? For Denise, blockchain is a database shared across a network of computers. As a record or block gets added to that database the blocks are chained together. Records on the blockchain are very difficult to change because each block has a hash which refers to the previous block. So, any change of a block requires a change of the entire chain. It is this attribute of blockchain which makes it very secure. For Tom, blockchain is a shared, continuously updated immutable database. It represents a single source of truth amongst trustless participants. As Tom is a cybersecurity expert he believes that blockchain inherently has two of the three attributes that cybersecurity requires: Integrity because of its immutably nature Availability because it is distributed Confidentiality isn’t something that blockchain has inherently but it can be added with encryption Tom also reminds us that blockchain exists in two basic design philosophies: public permissionless and private permissioned. Permissionless is most famously known via Bitcoin where anyone can participate at any level. Everything is decentralised and transparent in a trustless environment. A permissioned blockchain has a restricted access. It isn’t as decentralised and they require a certain degree of trust.   What is governance and its impact on blockchain and its members? Governance is about agreeing upfront the rules and the processes and what to do when things go wrong. It’s a system of rules that helps govern an ecosystem of players in how they can interact. Whilst working on her dissertation Denise started to interview supply chain business people who were trying to deploy a blockchain solution. During her interview she kept hearing that it isn’t about the technology but instead, a real lack of clarity around how firms need to work together much more closely than they're used to doing due to the nature of blockchain. What her interviewees were expressing was the need for a governance framework, or playbook. Blockchain impacts its members because they now have to share business processes, confidential information and intellectual property. It’s synonymous to them having to expose the underbelly of their organisation in ways that they haven't had to do before. This closeness of sharing sometimes blurs the lines in their eyes of where their company ends and others begins. For many this is a cultural shift which many companies are not used to. For Denise one of the key governance challenges is understanding the amount of changes that people and firms are going to have to do.   Collaborative governance as a key mechanism to removing obstacles Collaborative governance is a particular type of governance that in Denise’s point of view is quite well suited for blockchain as it addresses many of the common issues at the beginning of blockchain such as: information asymmetry, incentives, prehistory of cooperation or conflict of members. These are starting conditions that have to be addressed at the very beginning. This then flows into an agreement on how to make decisions, what is equitable,

Michael Shea is the Managing Director of the Dingle Group and the Chair of Sovrin Foundation’s SSI in IoT Working Group. In this podcast we discussed the white paper he authored on Self Sovereign Identity and IoT. To explain the opportunities SSI can provide to IoT, Michael introduces us to three profiles: Jamie (machine to person), Bob (machine to machine) and Bessie the cow (digital twin).   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a decentralised database, which is cryptographically secured and immutable. The decentralised part means that it operates in a wider ecosystem than traditional ones, that sits within corporate firewalls, which gives it greater resiliency and redundancy. The cryptographic component along with the different proof of work, resolve the double spend problem and bring a level of assurance that transactions have not been modified.   An introduction to Self-Sovereign Identify (SSI), Decentralised Identifiers (DID) and verifiable credentials. Self-sovereign identity is an identity model, where an entity is in control of its own identity and information related to it. SSI as a concept started to take shape in 2016 with Christopher Allen’s 10 principles of self-sovereign identity. In December 2020 the Sovrin Foundation released its 12 principles of self-sovereign identity, which fundamentally is about an entity’s ability to control the information about themselves. Decentralised identifiers (DIDs) is a pointer to the identify information known as a DID document that helps to create the trust layers within SSI. A verifiable credential is a cryptographic bundle that is created by an issuer of a credential such as the DVLA for a driver’s license. That credential includes attributes stating that the driver is legally entitled to drive a vehicle and it may contain other pieces of information such as your address and other details. A cryptographic bundle is signed using the public private key of the issuer in this case the DVLA which is then returned to the holder of the driver’s license. That holder can then use that credential to a verifier to indicate his/her authorisation to drive a vehicle.   Internet of Things (IoT) Machine to Person Machine to person is where a device is interacting with an individual. The machine can be attached or worn by a person and is measuring some aspect of the person's personal or physical environment and transmitting this data directly or indirectly to a connected device. For example, a person with diabetes would have a sensor that is attached to their body reading their glucose level and communicating the data to an app on a smartphone or a separate physical device.   Machine to machine Machine to machine is the communication between an IoT device and a computer, smartphone or device. Using the above analogy, the machine is the device or the smartphone speaking up to a central repository for transmitting that information to an endocrinologist on behalf of the patient.   Digital twins A digital twin is a virtual digital representation of a physical object. That can be a person, an animal, or a thing. The most common use of digital twins is in an industrial setting. For example, a jet engine has hundreds of sensors embedded inside it, streaming data off to the aircraft engine manufacturers and creating a whole digital profile of itself.   Risks associated with IoT On the 21st of October 2016, multiple major DDoS attacks happened which took down numerous high-profile websites such as Netflix, Twitter, GitHub, Airbnb and others. This denial of service attack, known as the Mirai botnet attack, was a result of the Mirai malware installed on a large number of IoT devices. Such attacks illustrated the risks associated with poor security on IoT devices. As the number of IoT devices continue to grow every year, Michael believes that IoT and security is going to continue being very much like oil and water.

Siddhartha Jha is the Founder & CEO of Arbol, an insurtech platform for parametric products that uses blockchain, big data, machine learning and smart contracts to bring transparency and remove delays and disputes of traditional insurance policies. In this podcast we revisit parametric insurance to discuss why it is now poised for new growth potential thanks to increased availability of granular data, improved technologies and attraction of non-traditional capital.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a system of distributed consensus. Instead of having a central authority determining when a transaction takes place, or when a particular event has taken place, you have a distributed consensus around that event or transaction taking place. Blockchain allows for immutability and allows for a tamper proof environment where different parties can agree on something happening without a central coordinating authority.   What is parametric insurance? Parametric insurance uses data to make a loss assessment instead of having a human check the level of damage from an event and pay based on a subjective loss estimate. Parametric uses data sets as it’s index and a trigger to make a payment. Sid uses an example of a farmer who takes an insurance policy for $100,000 if he/she doesn’t receive 3 inches of rainfall on his farm. Such parametric insurance changes insurance from this subjective loss assessment process, which can be filled with delays, disputes and sometimes fraud to one where once a trigger is generated an automatic payment will happen. This creates a great customer experience where there is greater transparency and peace of mind. From an incumbent insurer standpoint, the simplicity of parametric leads to scale and reduce costs. They can avoid relying on loss adjusters, managing different claims process and legal costs as we’re now seeing in business interruption contracts due to COVID. From a regulator perspective, Sid believes regulators could get interested in parametric insurance in its ability to fulfilling many gaps in the traditional insurance system: Covering high deductibles Where data sets are becoming richer to provide new innovative parametric insurance as it removes the proving of burden of loss from the customer to the data set   Why has parametric insurance not scaled yet? Parametric insurance has been around since the late 1990s but hasn’t quite scaled yet. Sid believes there are a number of reasons for that: Availability of granular data sets Technology and processing power can be an issue for processing simulations. For example, Arbol can process 40,000 – 50,000 simultaneous weather simulations to price an entire basket. This would have been very difficult 10 – 15 years ago with the available computing power back then. Customers are only now becoming comfortable and familiar with parametric insurance   Blockchain and parametric insurance Very often companies who offer parametric insurance using blockchain are challenged on whether or not they needed a blockchain. Sid believes that if you’re running a simple parametric insurance for one product in one region you don’t need a blockchain. A simple SQL database will be sufficient. Operating across a large number of regions, especially in regions where trust levels for institutions and insurance companies can be very low, blockchain can help. The decentralised nature of blockchain means you can have a data infrastructure which is decentralised. Something that Arbol has embraced since day 1. What this means is that when a payout happens a customer can know that Arbol had no control over that and that they can verify the original third-party data if they so choose to. Another reason why blockchain and parametric insurance can work well together is from an audit perspective. Parametric insurance can be using thousands of different IoT sensors that all require auditing. Blockchain’s time stamping, transparency,

Frank Lu is Head of Ping An Blockchain Technology at OneConnect Smart Technology, a subsidiary of Ping An. Previously to Ping An, Frank Lu was one of the original founders of Hyperledger Fabric. In this podcast we discuss the different approaches to blockchain and the advantages of creating encrypted data networks for data privacy, cross validation of data and ability to run business logic on encrypted data.   About Ping An Ping An is a Chinese holding conglomerate with 30 subsidiaries that mainly deal with insurance, banking, and financial services. The company was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Shenzhen. "Ping An" literally means "safe and well". Ping An ranked 7th on the Forbes Global 2000 list and 29th on the Fortune Global 500 list. The company is considered to be China's biggest insurer, with US$107 billion in gross premium income in 2018. Its market capitalization is at US$220 billion in July 2019, making it the world's largest insurer except for Berkshire Hathaway. Frank’s subsidiary, OneConnect Smart Technology, is mainly responsible for financial services. Frank heads the Technology Division for blockchain which is responsible for PingAn’s blockchain across the conglomerate.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a shared ledger technology which provides a single source of truth to all participants on a blockchain. It’s a way for different participants to be able to manage and work on the same data source. Every time a change is done to the data source, all participants will have visibility of that change. It has features which makes it immutable thus ensuring any attempts to delete a record or change a record will get noticed by the other participants.   Frank’s journey to blockchain Back in 2013, Frank was part of the IBM WebSphere Strategy Team. His team was working on gamification technology which involved using coins and badges as game elements to motivate a workforce. In 2014, The project was pivoted to a mobile gaming backend as a service working for Jerry Cuomo. At that time Ethereum hadn’t yet launched but had published the Ethereum whitepaper along with a few lines of code which attracted the interest of the team Frank worked at. They investigated the Ethereum whitepaper to determine how they could use it for their gaming backend work. Based on the mobile gaming backend work a new project was launched, initially called “Blue Chain” that received $1m to explore blockchain solutions. John Wolpert was invited to lead Blue Chain and Richard Brownwas also invited to participate in the project. Initially the plan was to avoid having to start from scratch in building a blockchain solution. They looked at the possibility of partnering with Ethereum to bring their technology to the enterprise market. However, due to internal politics it was decided for IBM to build their own blockchain solution. The Blue Chain initiative was then called Hyperledger Fabric. In December 2015, Hyperledger Fabric was formerly launched under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. In early 2016, PingAn convinced Frank to join them.   PingAn’s blockchain technology As head of blockchain technology at PingAn, Frank has an interesting view of consortiums. In his opinion consortiums are formed by entities who are interested in accessing other people’s data. Everybody wants to leverage other people’s data, however most aren’t willing to share their own data. His criticism of Hyperledger’s approach to blockchain is its use of channels which is essentially a point to point connection between counterparties, something which you can do with existing traditional technologies. Hyperledger’s approach is if you want to make confidentiality a priority then you should use blockchain technology. PingAn has a different approach. Their blockchain technology is heavily based on cryptography where all data is encrypted on the blockchain and where the participants can run business logic on encrypted data.

Gustav Strömfelt is Project Manager at the World Food Programme & New Venture Consultant. In this exciting podcast we discuss some of the blockchain work the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been conducting over the years including Building Blocks and collaborations with other UN agencies such as UN Women.   Winning the Nobel Peace Prize Winning the Nobel Peace Prize represents for Gustav an important spotlight on the importance that food has towards global peace. Awarding the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to WFP, the Norwegian Nobel Committee described the link between hunger and armed conflict as a vicious circle in which “war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence.” The Nobel Peace Prize gives WFP recognition “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” Gustav feels very humble and proud to be part of an organisation of 18,000 people, their partners and donors who all work together to ensure that the 690 million people who are hungry worldwide do not go to bed worrying about where they’re going to get their next meal.   What is blockchain? A its core, blockchain is a fancy accounting technology with some interesting bells and whistles. From his perspective, Gustav sees blockchain as an amazing way to ensure a unified vision of the truth across participants in an ecosystem. This creates the opportunity for consensus to be shared between organisations that’s effectively coded into an underlying platform. From an application standpoint it opens huge opportunities for collaboration and cooperation for use cases that considers the needs of an ecosystem and a common customer. Whether that’s a specific good that’s passing through a supply chain or an individual receiving tokens. Blockchain is a great way for the WFP to drive transparency, consensus and a unified vision of the truth.   About the World Food Programme (WFP) Created in 1961, the WFP’s purpose is to eradicate global hunger because one in 11 people worldwide doesn’t have enough to eat. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is one of the largest UN agency with 18,000 employees serving 138 million people worldwide across 83 countries. Every year the WFP gives out 15 billion food rations and $30m in cash. At the moment the WFP is probably one of the largest operating airlines in the world with over 100 aircraft along with 30 ships, 5,500 trucks actively moving goods and people to deliver humanitarian responses around the world.   The World Food Programmes Building Blocks Houman Haddad, is the founder of the WFP’s Building Blocks which launched in 2017 as part of their Blockchain for Zero Hunger initiative. What Houman realised was how inefficient cash transactions are from the creation of beneficiaries accounts to the way transaction are performed. The majority of cash delivery processes in humanitarian organisations is done through the creation of virtual accounts with a financial service provider. They hold custody of those accounts as in many cases refugees are not given the ability to open their own named accounts. Some from of authentication mechanism is created for the refugee's virtual account via a card or via biometrics for a transaction to take place between the financial service provider and the merchant which has been contracted by the humanitarian organisation. That process creates significant costs. In Jordan for example the WFP is servicing 140,000 beneficiaries across two refugee camps, four merchant shops with each transaction costing a fee between 2 – 3%. With 300,000 – 400,000 transactions a month this transaction cost can rise significantly. With Building Blocks,

Susan Joseph is the CEO and co-founder of HealthTrends.ai, a trusted third party delivering ongoing authoritative health data that's independently auditable and has legal weight. In this podcast we discuss the challenges the US Health Sector has regarding collection and distribution of health data and what role Smart COVID data on the blockchain can have to help fight the pandemic. Susan is both a consultant and attorney with startups and enterprises in a variety of settings, including financial services, data usage, ESG, and digital assets. She is also a consortium advisor to the Mining and Metals Industry Blockchain Initiative and is the Executive Director of Diversity in Blockchain, a 501(c)(3) entity that provides education and resources to support diversity and inclusion in the blockchain space.   What is blockchain? Susan views blockchain as a communications network layer on top of the internet that allows direct peer to peer transactions. To accomplish this, it requires cryptography, incentives such as game theory, other economic incentives, and computing power. It can be applied to a wide range of transactions from anything such as currencies to data usage which is where HealthTrends.ai jumps in. In our previous podcast together entitled “Innovation & diversity in the Insurance Industry”, Susan had a more technical definition of what is blockchain. Now she views blockchain more as a social, political, economic and computing tool.   Challenges the US Health Sector has regarding collection and distribution of health data The quality of public health data that is available to collect and act upon is the first defence at the beginning of a pandemic. The current pandemic has demonstrated that the manner in which the US captures public high quality health data, with which to make hard decisions, has been a stress test on every aspect of its healthcare system. That type of data, whilst published, is not easy to access, sort and aggregate thus making it really hard to make decisions in a timely manner in its current published form. In the US, every state is charged with issuing out public health information and publishing it. But they're not told how to publish it and in what form to make it available. They just put it up on their website in an unstructured manner. This creates challenges on downloading active data in a timely fashion. Every state has in a sense, their own standard to the data, making it difficult to have a uniform dashboard where data is easily aggregated or sortable. The data that the states are publishing has legal weight. It is important to recognise that the state themselves have not been recipient of a lot of infrastructure funds and they do the best they can with what they have. Susan wants to give special recognition to the “data nerds” and public health officials for collating and getting health data every day since the beginning of the pandemic. She sees HealthTrends.ai as upgrading the data layer by empowering organisations to access the data to make the necessary decisions.   About HealthTrends.ai Susan, is the CEO of HealthTrends.ai a company she co-founded at the beginning of the pandemic. They are a trusted third party, delivering ongoing authoritative health data that's independently auditable and has legal weight. They’re the trusted data source that spans legacy and cutting-edge technology solutions, allowing innovative organisations to access both. Their mission is to help any organisation turn health data into something actionable that they can use and base their decisions upon. The first tool they developed is the Coronavirus API that runs Coronavirus statistics. It is a free tool to support first responders who specifically use the data to confirm trends, assess risk for non-compliance, and create predictions to help manage their populations. Similarly, this type of data is used in insurance, economic projections, supply chain logistics,

Laurent Benichou, is Head of Blockchain Europe & US, that sits within the Group Emerging Technologies and Data team at AXA. In this podcast we discuss the main takeaways from his experience with Fizzy and more importantly we discuss how can blockchain and insurance be good bedfellows. Laurent shares with us some of the main mistakes insurers make with blockchain but he also the main blockchain opportunities that exist in insurance.   What is blockchain? In August 2018, Laurent defined on Insureblocks blockchain as: "A blockchain is a fully distributed database. This means it has no single point of failure and no central managing authority. Blockchain’s technical characteristics, such as its immutability and cryptographic verification, create numerous convenient features including fast and easy payments, smart contracts and the ability to indefinitely store information." At that time his answer was a very technical one which he believes misses the essence of what is blockchain. Today, Laurent defines blockchain as a digital system of uncensored value transfer. The winning present blockchain use cases are ones around the exchange of value, such as Bitcoin and lending with stable coins.   Main takeaways of Fizzy In September 2017, AXA launched Fizzy. Fizzy is a fully automated flight delay insurance policy that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and allows customers to get indemnified as soon as they arrive to their destination. The process is fully automated, with a smart contract deciding whether customers are eligible for indemnification. In November 2019, over 2 years after its launch AXA closed Fizzy. Laurent describes Fizzy as an opportunity to test out a new type of product based on blockchain technology. It provided his team with an incredible experience, which grabbed a lot more media attention that they had anticipated. They gained a lot knowledge during that experience on things such as: how to use a blockchain, how to handle gas fees on Ethereum, importance of auditing a smart contract, and much more. Taking the learnings from Fizzy, Laurent has the following top tips for aspiring blockchain projects: It’s always easier to convince people with a functioning proof of concept than with a PowerPoint. Never underestimate the cost and complexity of distribution especially when it comes to a B2B to B2C model. All new digital services need to be API and mobile first   Does blockchain and insurance make bad bedfellows? On the 24th of August 2020, Laurent wrote on Medium an article entitled “Navigating blockchain opportunities in insurance”. The first line of his article states: “Unifying Insurance and Blockchain has so far been the most difficult task of my entire career”. Laurent believes that insurance can play a part in protecting the crypto sector. He also believes that at their core both blockchain and insurance share a common element together which is about the exchange of value. However, they both tackle this common element in very different ways. Because of that difference it can be very difficult for them to work together in spite of the benefits blockchain can provide to insurance and insurance to blockchain. He is hopeful that the two will be able to work together. In the article Laurent lists out some mistakes he has witnessed while seeing “Blockchain projects” being developed, boosted or stopped in the insurance industry: Blockchain with or without tokens Add blockchain but leave the rest unchanged Ignoring the most obvious opportunities Refuse cryptocurrencies their status of financial assets Assume you can catch up later   Mistake 1: Blockchain with or without tokens? Most insurers look at blockchain and decided to focus on the technology without looking at the tokens themselves. Looking at blockchain technology without the tokens is minimising the number of total use cases you could look at. Laurent gives the example of using blockchain t...

Sabine Brink, Global Lead of Blockchain at Shell, shares with us how Shell is using blockchain technology within the energy industry. She walks us through a number of interesting blockchain initiatives they’ve worked on, such as decentralised digital passports, the Energy Web Foundation, LO3 Energy  and VAKT. We conclude this podcast with her views on how decentralised technologies can support the fight against climate change.   What is blockchain? Sabine recognises that there are many definitions to blockchain. One of the definitions that Shell uses is blockchain as an immutable tamper proof shared ledger of state changes of a digital asset. Technologies that enable blockchain such as algorithms, cryptography, and distributed systems have been around for decades. What makes blockchain unique is the combination of these technologies.   Shell’s Blockchain Centre of Excellence Sabine’s blockchain team sits within the digitalisation organisation within Shell. The team was set up in early 2017 with the aim to help guide Shell through this increasingly decentralised world. They are also tasked to ensure that they accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology within Shell but also in the energy industry. The Blockchain Centre of Excellence has the following focus: Partnering with all the Shell businesses to help them realise the benefits of blockchain Ensure that the right technology choices are made Building the capabilities, toolkits and skill sets to enable Shell to accelerate their adoption of blockchain Sabine gave us an example of how that would work where they would partner with the new energy business to develop ideas and concepts for decentralised strategies. The approach they take is first and foremost to understand what is the problem they’re trying to solve. They would run exploratory workshops where the focus is on understanding the problem that they’re trying to solve, how big of a problem it is and identifying what is the best technology that can help them resolve this problem. If blockchain is the best technology as defined through a clear set of assessments, Sabine’s team would guide the business unit through the process of taking an idea to a proof of concept, pilot and ultimately deployment. Sabine is passionate about the combination of a disruptive technology like technology and what it can do within the energy industry. She’s very interested in how new technology brings disruption into existing systems and/or in creating new economies. Sabine initially started off as business analyst within the team before becoming its technical lead and ultimately growing into the lead of the blockchain centre. Her team is now working on 10 different blockchain projects and are very excited about the combination of blockchain technology within the energy industry.   Shell’s early years with blockchain Shell was an early adopter of blockchain technology and started investigating its use in 2015. In the early years Shell had a small blockchain team testing out concept and running proof of concepts with different business units and building up their technical capability. From the learnings gained in proof of concepts in different business units they were able to formulate a clear strategy early on. This strategy helped them to understand where blockchain makes sense and where it doesn’t make sense. Shell’s blockchain strategy is defined in three key pillars: Reimagine current processes with blockchain technology to deliver cost savings, increase efficiency and drive standardisation. This includes creating digital ecosystems with Shell’s partners to remove inefficiencies and standardising non-competitive processes. Reimagining the operation of end-to-end value chains to find new value propositions, particularly in emerging or rapidly evolving markets such as the electricity market, carbon and mobility markets. Shell sees blockchain as an opportunity to revolutionise those ...

Sergey Nazarov is the co-founder of Chainlink, a decentralised oracle network that provides reliable, tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain. In this podcast we discuss the fundamental opportunity blockchains along with smart contracts, connected to real world data via oracles, can provide in creating a level of hyper reliability for transactions to occur that hasn’t been possible up to now. We also discussed how blockchain, smart contracts and oracles can create better insurance products and transform insurance cash flows into securitised tokenised assets.   What is blockchain? Blockchains are tamper proof data structures that end up creating an immutable highly reliable record of smart contract state or contractual agreement between parties. The way they do that is through the use of cryptography they prove that the data and the proof within a blockchain is actually reflective of what happened. For Sergey the fact that you have a system of record and a system of executing transactions that’s hyper reliable is actually a very unique innovation in the history of contracts and in the history of how people interact with each other. Because traditionally what you would have had are multiple parties, within a transaction, keeping their version of what happened. That means two important things. (1) that version of history, is their vision of history, whether it’s right or wrong. That version for example may have been corrupted or manipulated to their benefit. (2) It's a version of history that they can't easily present as a reliable proof of what happened to other parties, whether that's the counterparty or whether that's a regulator. This inability to prove what's happening in a transaction or prove what the underlying value of an asset or prove what happened in an insurance kind of agreement is what leads to the big problems in the global financial system as was seen in the 2008 financial crisis. The 2008 financial crisis was really a problem of proving that certain assets were in a certain state, and that certain people were in a certain state of solvency. Because everybody had their own version of history, and no one had a unified, single trustworthy version of history, the markets became dislocated and disconnected from reality. Blockchain provides the ability for all parties in a transaction to have one single, hyper reliable form of history that everyone knows is true. And therefore, nobody even needs to keep their own copy.   Smart contracts A smart contract is a tamper proof digital agreement that is represented on a blockchain. Blockchain provides a data structure, where the data about a transaction is hyper reliable. With smart contracts you now have a certain logic and conditions that gets executed, as coded into the contract. This is a hyper reliable system that sits outside the control of any of the people in the contract. Sergey believes that smart contracts should instead be named tamper proof digital agreements. Smart contracts take standard digital agreements and provide a level of unique guarantee that digital agreements can’t provide because they’re not secured cryptographically on a blockchain.   Trust in a brand vs cryptography The relationship and the brand of an insurance company or financial institution is there to assure you of solvency and of reputational loss if the contract is mishandled, misrepresented or not executed properly.  Reputation brand is essentially a mechanism to guarantee reliability. The internet has created a paradigm shift by being able to reliably guarantee a relationship between a user and the outcomes they expect from an internet based agreement. In those situations, people abandon brand and relationship and simply go towards the quality they can get at the best price. In addition, publicised failures from recognised brands like WireCard and Enron to name a few,

George Alayon – Assistant Director in Insurance Supervision at the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA). George leads a small team whose responsibility is for pushing the insurance agenda of the authority. They oversee the insurance regulatory sandbox and Innovation Hub as well as the supervision of innovative insurers here in Bermuda. In this podcast we discuss the influential role the BMA plays in fostering innovation in the insurance industry.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a digital ledger where information can be stored, duplicated, and distributed across a network of computers whilst being cryptographically protected. For George, it’s just the opposite of the traditional way of storing information in a centralised manner with a single point of failure. This traditional process also may or may not be suite for the production of digital assets.   Introduction to the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) The BMA is the sole regulator of insurance companies, banks, trust companies, investments, the Bermuda Stock Exchange and credit unions. Recently they were given the mandate to regulate digital assets. Locally they issue the Bermuda currency which is pegged to the US dollar. As the sole financial services regulator on the island, they pride themselves to being responsible for maintaining Bermuda’s reputation as a top jurisdiction of choice especially for insurance and reinsurance. Bermuda is one of a few jurisdictions in the world that have gained full solvency to equivalence from the EU, as well as having obtained both qualified and reciprocal jurisdiction status from the US NAIC. In 2018, Bermuda was one of the first countries in the world to offer a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital asset businesses.   Evolution of insurance and digital assets BMA defines digital assets to be anything that exists in binary format, and comes with the right to use it and includes a digital representation of value. In George’s view, blockchain technology is a gateway to revolutionise the financial sector. Blockchain technology allows for the seamless exchange of information related to the basic elements of a contract including the considerations. In the case of insurance, considerations includes the premiums paid by the insured in exchange for payments of claims in case of a loss event. Historically the insurance industry has been heavily reliant on manual processes. The arrival of blockchain technology has given rise to a thriving digital asset business sector, which has forced the insurance industry and the rest of the financial services sector to rethink the way they operate and the future role they will play in this ecosystem. Over the next two to three years, George sees a lot more market acceptance with the integration of digital assets, as a medium of exchange for insurance policies, as well as a utility pass or access to DLT based ecosystems.   Regulators role The insurance industry is inherently risk averse. One of the regulators biggest concerns is whether these technological breakthroughs have policyholder protection has as top of mind? Do they disclose enough information for parties to make an informed decision? How are companies thinking and preparing for the worst case scenarios? How do they intend to protect the data of their customers? Who is responsible for what in this decentralised network? How is the usual risk management process being replaced with this new process? At the end of the day all these questions are here to answer the question about how the interest of the policyholders will be protected? George recognises that regulators need to think outside of the box and try to understand the technologies themselves. In addition to performing their legislative mandate, policyholder protection, they can take a more active role in encouraging innovation. For example, by utilising technology to improve their own internal operations,

Richard Brown is the Chief Technology Officer at R3. He leads the team that has invented, designed and brought to market the Corda blockchain platform. He now also leads the team that’s building out their second major product line, called Conclave a platform to securely share and analyse data using confidential computing.   What is blockchain? Previously Richard gave Insureblocks a definition of blockchain from an enterprise perspective. A blockchain like Corda is all about allowing multiple firms in a market to be in sync with each other about facts, they care about such as loans and trade deals. Documents which are shared between firms such as notification of loss for an insurance policy, will invariably evolve over time. The claim gets reviewed, processed and authorised. All those business processes are executed within a firm.  Other firms across the ecosystem that have a stake in those documents need to be in consensus about their status. For Richard, blockchain is all about ensuring that all the participants in an inter firm business process are in sync and remain so. The key value proposition being that “what you see is what I see”. Since our last podcast together in April 2019, Richard believes that his original definition of blockchain has been mostly validated by projects R3 has successfully run such as Spunta, by ABI (the Italian Banking Association). Spunta is about ensuring Italian banks are in sync with each other, that their balances reconcile and all the details are correct.   Security on the web – the padlock on your browser We rarely think about how computers work or what promises they make. This can lead to some unexpected or often problematic outcomes. When browsing the web, including going onto social media sites like Facebook, we are trained to look out for that padlock next to that URL within our internet browser as it gives us a sense of security. What that padlock tells us is that the connection between ourselves and Facebook is secure. That we are talking to the real Facebook.com and that connection is with servers controlled by Facebook.com. This means that whatever data you are exchanging with Facebook is protected in transit as it leaves your computer and goes across Facebook servers. However, what it doesn't say is what Facebook will do with the data, it simply tells you that they are the ones who will receive it. Once Facebook receives that data they can do whatever they like with it. Something which of course has led to some press scandals as the Cambridge Analytica one. Social media sites today haven’t deployed any technological measure to constrain or control how they use your data. As consumers we rely entirely on social and legal measures to constrain what they do with that data. The padlock in the browser effectively gives us a false sense of security, because whilst it gives protection to the data as it moves it doesn’t do anything about how the data is ultimately used by the receiving party. This problem of course isn’t just for consumers but also for businesses. Banks will route client orders to exchanges to buy or sell shares. Insurance companies will send data to government agencies or third party credit agencies. A lot of the data that is being sent may include personally identifiable and risky information. As a company, the only way you can get comfortable with that is by investigating the reputation and procedures of that firm. For firms to get a better understanding of their market share or how they compare with their competitors they have two ways of doing that. Share information with their competitors which most wouldn’t want to and even if accepted is usually prohibited in numerous jurisdictions. The other approach is sharing it with third parties such as Bloomberg in the financial industry. Financial institutions share with Bloomberg information regarding trades they’ve done and at what price. Bloomberg aggregates all that data,

David Palmer is the Blockchain Lead and IoT at Vodafone Business, In this podcast we discuss the convergence of blockchain, 5G, AI and IoT (Internet of Things). In addition, we discussed the evolution of internet of things to internet of value and some of the exciting work Vodafone is doing in this space from Smart Cities, to supply chain and to the Energy Web Foundation. David has been working in the telco sector for the last 20 years. He has worked on broadband, ADSL rollout, satellite broadband and for the last 10 years on IoT including combining it with blockchain for the last 4 years.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed ledger that is shared between different parties. When you combine that with transactions you get to the basis of the first use case of blockchain which is Bitcoin. Bitcoin demonstrated how you can build trust by having transactions written on a shared and distributed ledger where different parties validate the transactions and provide its security through their combined computational power. David notes that this is a simple definition of blockchain. Over the last three years there has been an evolution of blockchain. On one end you have public blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum versus private blockchains with permissioned access formed by consortiums. Issues of interoperability arise when you try to bring those different blockchains together. In addition there are different protocols and consensus mechanisms that come in to play from DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), proof of stake and proof of work. Blockchain is a continuously evolving technology, but at its core it is a technology about trust. David mentions that there is a lot of friction today in everyday process. These are essentially processes built to establishing trust. The real power of blockchain is in providing a trusted shared platform to automate those process to remove that friction. Blockchain’s role in digital transformation is in the removal of the trust issue, it’s in the automation of processes which will give rise to a new evolution of automated business models and processes.   Explosion in IoT devices Statista is forecasting end-user spending on IoT solutions to reach $1.6 trillion by 2025 from 21.5 billion IoT devices. These are staggering numbers! With the increase adoption of 5G these IoT devices will be able to provide large amounts of data within nano-seconds. Vodafone has a Global IoT platform called Global Digital Services Platform (GDSP). This platform is at the very heart of the IoT offering to Vodafone’s customers, and is also offered as an IoT platform to other Telco’s. The GDSP provides all the management facilities for customers and channels to manage their individual IoT SIM estates. Vodafone has been a leader in IoT for the last 10 years as recognised by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. What IoT allows businesses to do is to digitise their assets. It allows for those assets to produce data which unlocks new business models and monetisation opportunities. This is a space that Vodafone has experience in which it has been putting to use in helping its clients. David has seen supply chain as a key industry that is seeing a large growth in IoT  devices. For example with recent conversations of the Pfizer vaccine that has to be kept at minus 70 degrees, how is that ensured?  You need data from devices at the manufacturer, to supply chain, to delivery which can be provided by IoT devices. Getting the trust in the data and provenance of the information will need some form of distributed architecture and distributed solution, so that the parties in that can have trust in the data that's been produced. Pfizer and the vaccine distribution is a prime example of where new emerging technologies such as IoT, AIs to help manage the risk and blockchain can come together to make a real difference.   Transition of Internet of Things to Internet of Value Raghavendra Kulkarni,

Sarah Downy is the Managing Director of FINPRO and co-leads the DART, Digital Asset Risk Transfer, team. In this podcast Sarah shares her insights of the crypto insurance market for 2019 and 2020 along for the need for more education of insurers on the opportunity to serve the need of companies who build blockchain technology and of companies who hold or interact with digital assets.   What is blockchain? As an insurance person, Sarah defines blockchain technology as a technology that stores digital information on a public database with a number of interesting features such as immutability, transparency and traceability. The way blockchain works is that it stores transactions on blocks that are verified and assigned a hash. She also notes that insurers often confuse blockchain technology with crypto and illicit behaviour. A perception that Sarah and her team are working very hard to change.   Overview of the Crypto Insurance Market in 2019 Sarah, describes the crypto insurance market in 2019 as very hesitant and uncertain. The cost of insurance was very high and coverage was very limited. The process for clients to get coverage was both complicated and a lengthy one. Marsh’s clients were mainly focused on two types of insurance: D&O insurance Commercial crime and specie market coverage D&O insurance, director’s and officer’s liability insurance protects the individuals running the company. It covers claims brought by investors, shareholders, regulators, against the directors, officers and employees associated with things like a breach of a duty, securities violation, regulatory investigations, or proceedings. Commercial crime is the coverage that reimburses companies for loss due to theft, disappearance or destruction of property. In the case of digital asset, it protects warm and hot storage wallets as compared to the specie market coverage provides coverage for the loss of digital assets from internal and external theft, damage or destruction of private keys. A hot wallet is a digital wallet that is online whilst a cold wallet is one which is completely offline. The specie market is insuring vaults that custodians are using to store the private keys. Sarah notes that if a company is building blockchain technology the pricing should be more favourable and the insurance capacity should be more readily available as opposed to a company that holds a large amount of digital assets or is working with digital assets.  However unfortunately companies that build blockchain technology are not being treated in a similar manner to a normal company building legacy or well known technologies as insurers still think of blockchain technology as crypto and elicit behaviour and they can't separate them out. However 2019 was also a year of innovation for Marsh as it is the year they launched their Blue Vault facility.   5 key trends evolving in the crypto insurance market in 2020 In spite of COVID19 five key trends have emerged in the crypto insurance market in 2020: More regulatory certainty Transitioning market More insurance purchasing Crypto maturity Testing of an untested market   More regulatory certainty In the insurance industry we are seeing a desire for more regulatory certainty around the digital asset space. Many insurers are tracking what the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) is doing.  For example: Spotlight on Initial Coin Offerings and Digital Assets. Insurers are also watching  the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) who for example recently published some favourable guidance letters around the use of and storage of digital assets for regulated banks. With increased regulatory certainty comes more comfort from the insurers.   Transitioning market Commercial insurance markets in general, are becoming much more challenging, and some might even call them hard markets. Unrelated to digital assets,

Oliver Oram – CEO & co-founder of Chainvine & Dr. Rajiv Mathur – CTO and co-founder of Chainvine walk us through a use case they worked on with HMRC and a number of other participants to reducing friction in international trade. We also discussed in some detail the key challenges around consortiums, IP and openness. A must listen for blockchain initiatives debating through those various points.   What is blockchain? Oliver answers this question by explaining why from a business perspective Chainvine uses blockchain as an engine for its platform whose fundamental principles were to have solid identity, self-sovereign data and security. Rajiv reminds us that there are many different types of blockchains or distributed ledgers. The best examples of blockchains are public ledgers like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Distributed ledgers also come in many different forms with many not actually being blockchains but more as shared ledgers and some who are hybrids between the two. Chainvine takes an agnostic point of view to blockchains and distributed ledger technologies and utilise the most relevant one depending on the use case and problem they are trying to solve.   About Chainvine The name Chainvine is derived from blockchain and vines. The background of Chainvine is in enterprise and supply chain whose original focus was on fine wine. However, since then they have worked with many other commodities from steel to fair trade coffee.   The challenge of paper in supply chains On 15th September Lord Holmes publishes a new report, “Reducing Friction in International Trade” (RFIT).  Oliver, resumed the challenges of supply chain to one word, “paper”. As part of the research into the writing of the report, it was identified that 80% of the cost of importing grapes in the UK is down to paperwork. The COVID crisis has demonstrated that that the physical way of doing things in trade, in the usage of paper is actually a critical failure in our supply chains. For Oliver, it is imperative for the UK, to adopt new technologies whether it is blockchain, DLT, AI or machine learning, to become resilient and sustainable to trade internationally.   Intelligent Wine Chainvine was invited to participate at an event organised by HMRC, where Oliver and Rajiv presented the tale of the ‘intelligent wine” that had travelled with them across Europe gathering intelligence through different data mechanisms, such as distributed ledger, the Chainvine platform, and internet of things (IoT) devices. This story essentially showed to the HMRC attendees that Chainvine is able to demonstrate where a good is as it moves across borders, how much it’s worth, what condition it is in and with whom that good is. This wasn’t about talking about blockchain this or blockchain that, but about how it was being used in this particular use case. For Oliver this isn’t about tearing down regulations or standards, it's about making them easier to comply with, and making it easier for government to absorb that information and ensure that compliance and regulations are being met. It isn’t either about tearing down standards but ensuring that they are better met with this type of technology than it would ever be with any sort of paper system that is being used at the moment. The technology brings a higher level of resiliency and sustainability.   Managing the challenges of consortiums, IP and openness Post conversation with HMRC which had expressed an interest in Chainvine’s solution, Oliver and his team were introduce to the Wine and Spirits Trade Association  (WSTA) who expressed an interest in their solution. This was partially due to the challenge that WSTA is facing with VI-1 documentation requirements from the British Government. The WSTA estimates that full VI-1s for EU wines would mean 600,000 additional forms at a cost of £70m in additional processing. There was a strong desire by the WSTA and its wine importers and exporters to experiment...

David Behrends, Founder & President at Farmer Connect and Managing Partner and Head of Trade at the coffee trading company named Sucafina, joins us along with Diana Kaliff, Business Development Manager at Farmer Connect to discuss coffee on the blockchain. In this podcast we get to learn about how Farmer Connect is helping to not only to digitise their industry but also in bringing transparency and traceability to all players within the coffee supply chain industry from farmers to the end consumer.   What is blockchain? Diana describes blockchain in how they use the technology at Farmer Connect. For them blockchain is a secure database that enables to both securely store and share data between different business partners.   For Dave, blockchain is like the arteries in our bodies: Arteries have thick, strong walls, that make them resistant to high pressure that exists near the heart. This is similar to blockchain’s cryptographic level of security. Each major organ in the human body has their own special kind of artery that delivers the needed supplies. This is similar to blockchain in the sense that you have public blockchain, private blockchains, permissioned blockchains each one of them with their own specific use case. Arteries take oxygen away from the heart and distribute it very efficiently to all the body's tissues. This is similar to a blockchain that has lots of complex data, standardising it and allowing it to seamlessly flow from one participant to another.   Challenges of the coffee industry and its level of digitisation The coffee industry is characterised by a large amount of smallholder farmers who are facing a lot of issues around traceability and sustainability. Consumers on the other hand, especially with millennials and post millennials really want to know two things: Has the coffee been responsibly sourced and has the farmer been paid a fair price Are the farmers themselves sustainable? Do they take care of social and environmental issues on the farm? Being able to track both of these points is very difficult and to some degree impossible in the past. However, with the arrival of new technologies such as satellite imagery which can be used to measure deforestation. Soil samples analysis allows farmers to understand how much fertiliser is the right amount to be used for their farm. This kind of precision agriculture allows farmers to use less fertiliser and lower their environmental footprint. Both of these examples produce a lot of data. In addition you have companies like Starbucks who have announced their intention to go resource positive - storing more carbon than it emits, eliminating waste and providing more clean freshwater than it uses. All of the forementioned bring up lots of challenges and opportunities around how data is captured? How is it integrated? How is it stored? How is standardised? However, Dave believes that the biggest challenge is concerning the ownership of data. In the past many of the small farmers had zero technological capacity. In the past firms would send an agronomist to the field, they would “harvest” data of the farm, enter it into a table, hop back into a jeep back to the office and upload it into the company’s database to share the data with their clients. That wasn’t a really good model nor did it scale effectively. Now with mobile phones, farmers can be empowered to own their data, to control their data and hopefully to monetize it as well.   An introduction to Farmer Connect Farmer Connect is an industry led initiative, based out of Geneva, that is here to tackle the challenges of the coffee industry explained above. Farmer Connect is here to provide end to end connectivity between farmers at the beginning of the supply chain with the consumers on the other end. The vision is to humanise consumption through technology, because they believe that technology should bring people together,

Dale Chrystie is a Business Fellow and Blockchain Strategist at FedEx who has been in the transportation industry for over 30 years. He also serves as chairman of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) Standards Council, and is a member of the Blockchain Research Institute. In this podcast Dale walks us through the work FedEx is doing in the blockchain space and his view on why he believes the future of blockchain is an open source one instead of a consortium one.   What is blockchain? Dale believes that to effectively define what is blockchain to as wide an audience as possible you need to use basic language and basic concepts. He boils blockchain down to five words: digital, ledger, permanent, transparent, and shared. Blockchain is a digital ledger that is permanent and uses cryptography. Once an entry is added to the ledger it can’t be changed. It’s transparent to all relevant parties and it is shared which is to say it exists on the cloud.   Having said that, Dale is also known for characterising blockchain at conferences as boring and useless. Because blockchain is just a database that sits amongst many other tried and tested databases that are fast, process millions of transactions, are enterprise ready and ruggedised. Blockchain isn’t quite there yet. It isn’t very fast, scalable or mature. However, what it does, it does really well. For example, where authenticity and provenance matter, blockchain will completely change worldwide supply chains.   Challenges of the logistic industry and the role blockchain can play The logistics industry is one where information systems use paper legal documents and electronic data is transmitted via electronic data interchange (EDI) and where documents are often shared via email, fax and courier. In the freight industry or the Less than Truckload (LTL), industry as it is known in the US, has been using paper process with bills of lading, documents and manifests for decades. Dale believes it is ripe for moving forward into the digital world. In 1978, Fred Smith founder of FedEx, is famous for saying "The information about the package is as important as the package itself." For Dale, Smith was way ahead of his time as that statement still holds true today. He believes that we are at this very unique intersection of the physical world and the digital world. Where on one side you have the physical world and on the other you have a digital twin of it which contains data about the package. Blockchain is the first technology where companies will be able to share selected data in a peer to peer fashion without the need of middlemen. For Dale, blockchain has opened our eyes to what is in the realm of the possible. He doesn’t think of blockchain as process improvement. He thinks of it as a breakthrough technology. As he states if you look at blockchain as process improvement you can do this with existing legacy technology. If you look at blockchain within the breakthrough realm then no existing legacy technology could have changed the art of what is possible and the nature of the conversation as blockchain has done.   Fedex blockchain journey Fedex’s blockchain journey started around a process in the dispute resolution area that was causing freight claims for a couple of million dollars a year. Around that time Walmart had a few early use cases in the food safety space which had inspired Dale on how blockchain could be used. The identified issue was for a three party dispute resolution scenario involving a receiver, a shipper and a carrier. The issue was that the receiver was ordering hypothetically 100 items from the shipper via a purchase order. The shipper then received it and fulfilled it. In their fulfilment process they pushed it to the warehouse in two pallets of 40 items and created a bill of lading. The two pallets of 40 and the bill of lading is given to the carrier and ultimately delivered to the receiver.

Ran Zhao is Founder of Blockchain Business Bridge and Innovation Officer at Innovation Centre Denmark, a public organization under Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Education and Science of Denmark. In this podcast Ran walks us through the opportunities blockchain projects have to expand in the Chinese market by sharing her experience of such a project for Danish companies. The innovation Centre Denmark helps Danish companies to build up their innovation and technology development and connect them to international resources. The Blockchain Business Bridge is a non-profit platform for knowledge exchange, and business communication between China, Denmark and the world. The project serves as a launchpad for Danish businesses to take their blockchain activities to the next level.   What is blockchain? To define what is blockchain, Ran took us throough a journey across time. From the Stone Age to now trade and transactions have always been the engine of economic growth. Transactions however have become more complicated. Transactions are not just physical goods but services, solutions, stocks and property. The marketplaces themselves have also become more complicated. Technology has enabled trade to move from offline to online as it increasingly becomes more digital. Both the number of participants and locations of those participants has increased, thus complicating trade. All this complexity leads to one fundamental problem, a problem of trust. To solve this trust issue, we have resorted to the use of centralised intermediaries such as banks, financial institutions and big companies who have excellent credit records. Big corporates can invade your data privacy, financial institutions have gone bankrupt and banks can deceive us as recently demonstrated in the FinCEN files where major banks like JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and a number of other big banks have defied money laundering crack downs by profiteering from illicit funds from Russian oligarchs and drug lords. Centralised intermediaries are usually inefficient and have numerous points of friction creating increased transaction costs. Blockchain technology enables stakeholders in a complex ecosystem to coordinate with each other transactions in an efficient and cost effective manner. Blockchain technology has the following attributes: Cryptographically secure Distributed ledger where stakeholders can keep their own record of their data in a privacy adhering manner A consensus mechanism to facilitate agreement between the stakeholders Smart contracts to automate transactions based on codified rules Commercial and industrial applications can be built on top of it to create a whole new ecosystem of digital economy.   The Innovation Centre of Denmark Ran works at the Innovation Centre Denmark in Shanghai, part of the Trade Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Education and Science of Denmark, whose mission is to help Danish companies and higher education institutions explore possibilities in some of the world’s leading innovation hubs, such as in Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Seoul, Boston and Munich. On one hand they help Danish innovative companies, start-ups and SMEs to enter and scale up in international markets. They help them improve their business models and polish the business plans and help them research of local industry players and potential partners / investors. On the other hand, they pull the knowledge and experience from all their innovation hubs to Denmark to keep Denmark’s competitiveness, innovation and tech. Blockchain Business Bridget is an example of such projects by bringing the experience on how to develop a blockchain ecosystem and business model from China to inspire Denmark.   Chinese blockchain ecosystem China is seen as a front runner of blockchain technology and applications. China has the highest number of patents in terms of blockchain and DLT.

Robert Barnes is the co-founder and CEO of TradeIX and the co-founder of the Marco Polo network. TradeIX is the network operator that runs the Marco Polo network a consortium of banks and corporates that transact both domestically and globally. In this podcast Rob, takes us through how Marco Polo is able to drive trade and working capital innovation with blockchain technology.   What is blockchain? Rob, looks at blockchain from a distributed ledger technology (DLT) standpoint because their interest is in peer to peer permissioned transactions. Rob, explains how there are different types of blockchain from the broadcast model, also known as public blockchain, such as Bitcoin, to the peer to peer model like Corda. A blockchain that has financial transactions, needs a peer to peer network that is highly permissione where only the participants to the transaction have visibility over it. For Rob, blockchain is a platform that facilitates the sharing of data between different legal entities that are permissioned to have visibility over a transaction. TradeIX / Marco Polo also use the same technology to run stateless calls. A stateless call is where you’re using the communication protocols of blockchain to call something or to request something that doesn’t need to be written onto the blockchain. By doing this you avoid the use of APIs between the various legal entities, companies and customers. APIs are used to connect into large corporates’ back end systems, ERP systems or underwriting ones to name a few.   DLT breaking down silos in trade finance When you look at the financing part of trade it is about interactions between corporate entities and their bank. This could be as simple as a payment. Whatever the interaction it happens via silos that need to talk to each other. Most of the time this communication happens via emails with PDFs, via API calls or sometimes it requires the entity to join a particular business network to get access to the data within a silo. If they do join a business network the power is usually centralised, owned by a third party and more importantly you get into issues of data residency. Blockchain / DLT provides the opportunity for everybody to control and manage their own data within their desired jurisdiction and shared with the counterparties that they are doing business with globally. This enables the breaking down of silos as parties start to communicate and transact between each other across the DLT, whilst providing all the permissioned ones with access to this single version of the truth in an immutable manner. Having access to this single version of the truth enables all parties to avoid the unnecessary cost of data reconciliation and verification. For Rob, blockchain / DLT at its core affords the ability to take risk and cost out of everyday processes that are done today.   TradeIX TradeIX started out its journey by being super focused on the actual financial transaction within trade. As they started working with banks, insurers and corporates their journey evolved into solving problems of communication between businesses, financial institutions, and the various ecosystem participants. For example, it enables corporates to exchange purchase orders and invoices between themselves without having to go through a centralised business network, use paper, or email.   Marco Polo   Rob had been involved in trade and trade finance technology for a number of years. He had been looking at a few technologies that were starting to converge which could make a huge difference in the way in which businesses transact and do business globally. Those three technologies were blockchain, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML). Rob felt that if you could bring these three technologies together in a way that created and broke down the silos and created efficiencies in communicating information and documents in a digital way across the globe you coul...

Rebecca Hofmann is Chairman of the Blockchain for Energy Consortium (previously known as OOC Oil and Gas Blockchain Consortium) a collaborative effort of 10 major energy companies to learn, lead and leverage blockchain technology for the energy industry. Additionally, Rebecca is Head of Innovation at Equinor, a Norwegian based global energy company operating in 30 countries, where she focuses on the strategy and innovations dealing with blockchain technology.   What is blockchain? Rebecca looks at blockchain from a business perspective as a back-end technology, with the potential to truly transform how we work. It's a shared digital ledger, that is allowing to have a more seamless way of working with a central source of truth in which business activity can be self-executed, recorded in real time, in a transparent way, with no central point of failure, that's making it more secure.   Challenges of the Energy Industry The energy industry has been facing challenges like never before. There has been extreme price fluctuations in a negative way affecting all of the entire industry. This situation has stimulated the industry to work in a new way and to embrace digitalisation to help them achieve that. Low energy prices, the threat of companies having to either merge or actually go out of business has helped the industry to push digitalization in a way it would have been uncomfortable doing in the past. Additionally, it has pushed the industry to collaborate even further to share the cost of R&D, share the cost of development, share the risk and share subject matter experts to create the right solution that all the companies need.   Rebecca’s journey into blockchain Rebecca’s journey into blockchain started off when a colleague of hers at Equinor gave her his ticket to attend a conference at Rice University on this new emerging technology called blockchain. During the conference, Rebecca rapidly realised that this technology was about a collaborative tool that also enabled interacting with external parties. She wrote an email up the chain at Equinor expressing the need to pay attention to blockchain technology and she wanted to be part of it. Equinor already had started some blockchain initiatives and she was able to bring them together into her team as Head of Innovation.   Journey to launching the Blockchain for Energy Consortium In December 2017, Equinor alongside BP, Shell, ABN AMRO, ING, Société Générale and others launched VAKT a commodity post trade management company. Rebecca describes VAKT as the first real blockchain solution to enter the energy industry in Europe, from which they have gained a lot of learnings from. After Rebecca’s participation at the blockchain conference at Rice University, representatives from Exxon Mobile and Chevron reached out to her to discuss how they could keep discussing about blockchain as a group of three. As the three of them kept meeting others started joining in and participating in the conversation. As the number of participants grew they decided to formerly start a forum called the US Oil and Gas Blockchain Forum in February 2018. They met across the year and it rapidly grew to 17 operators. The operators were starting to open up to the idea of collaboration and agreeing that on some use cases that they shared common pain points. They also consciously made the decision not to focus on blockchain as the tool but on the pain points that as an industry they can solve together. Throughout the launch of the forum they embraced the mantra of “Learn, Lead and Leverage”. They organised a lot of events by bringing experts from different disciplines to expand the learnings of the forum’s members. Towards the end of 2018 the idea was floated to the17 members of the forum on who was willing to put some money together, some subject matter experts and be willing to work together to actually test the technology around specific use cases.

Ralph Chami, Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund’s Institute for Capacity Development, isn't a tree hugging hipster. He is a financial economist whose interest in whales has unlocked a well known fact by scientists but not by the general public. A whale during its lifespan is worth $2m in carbon capture and carbon sequestration services, whilst a dead whale's meat is worth $50,000. An African Forest Elephant's tusk is worth $40,000 but an elephant's carbon capture and carbon sequestration services as a living creature is worth $1.75m! Today we have a market for dead creatures but we don't have a market for the services rendered, in terms of carbon capture, by living creatures such as whales and elephants. Join us in this incredible podcast to hear how blockchain can help build a living and regenerative market that not only protects those magnificent creatures but build a circular economy that is a win-win for businesses, governments, local communities and societies around the world.   What is blockchain? Blockchain is an electronic ledger that ensures that all parties in a contract can record their transactions in a transparent, permanent and permissioned manner on an end to end basis. It also removes the need for intermediaries.   From the IMF to an article on Nature’s Solution to Climate Change Ralph works as the Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund’s Institute for Capacity Development. The institute is tasked with training staff of the IMF which includes over 1500 economists as well as the training of the 189 member countries of the IMF. Ralph’s hobby is studying the great whales. A friend of Ralph belongs to the Great Whale Conservancy group which operates out of the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico. Four years ago his friend managed to get him an invitation onto a research vessel to study the great whales, including the blue whales, fin whales and gray whales. For Ralph this was a life changing experience. Shortly after the expedition Ralph had dinner with members of the expedition whose scientists shared with him the role of whales in carbon capture and carbon sequestration – long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. This information completely  changed Ralph’s life as he had no idea about this fact that scientists have known for a long time. It impacted him in two ways: First was the immensity of the role whales play in carbon capture. Whales capture carbon on their body and capture carbon indirectly through what we call primary fertilisation, the amount of carbon dioxide that the whales contribute to keeping out of the atmosphere, directly and indirectly, is equivalent to that captured by thousands of trees! Second was the frustration that scientists had in their failure to effectively communicate the first piece of information to saving the whales. Nobody was acting upon it. Ralph realised that the problem in the conversation between the scientists and the policy makers was that they were speaking in a different language. When scientists put forward plans to save the whales, policy makers only saw costs. The benefits of saving the whales was in the realm of science whilst the costs were in the realm of dollars and cents. What we had here as Ralph would say from one of his favourite movies, Cool Hand Luke, was a “failure to communicate”. Scientists would communicate the benefits of saving the whales in scientific terms whilst policy makers heard costs in dollars, the units talked about were different. Ralph realised he had to translate the scientific benefits into dollars so that policy makers could understand the cost of mitigation is X and the return in benefits is Y. Ralph made the case in economic terms, in a neutral manner, that demonstrated that the value far exceeds the costs. His article was published on the IMF’s Finance and Development Magazin...