ANIA, the Italian National Association of Insurance Enterprises, recently announced an ongoing experiment that uses blockchain to improve the management of dispute resolution and liability claims in the pre-litigation phase.
The experiment is carried out together with Reply, one of the main Italian IT companies, CeTIF, the research centre on technology, innovation and financial services, and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. In addition, the Scientific Committee also includes IVASS, the Institute for insurance supervision.
The insurance companies involved in the project are Axa, Cargeas-Cardif, Cattolica, Generali, Helvetia, Reale ITES GEIE.
The project consists of the study of an alternative dispute resolution service between clients and insurance companies (ADR), using a blockchain sandbox, a virtual environment in which to test real cases involving companies, consumers and other actors involved in the insurance process.
In order to analyse the results obtained, a Scientific Committee has been created which directs and supervises the activities that take place in the Sandbox, composed of representatives of ANIA, but also of CeTIF, Università Cattolica, Reply and IVASS.
The expectation is that the test will provide clear benefits to those participating in the experiment and that it will thus enable the industry to anticipate market development factors.
The use of blockchains serves to create and manage Trusted Smart Contracts for the exchange of payments involved in a dispute resolution, through a so-called blind auction mechanism. No further technical details are available at the moment.
The President of ANIA, Maria Bianca Farina, said:
“Thanks to this initiative we intend to experiment in a concrete and effective way the potential offered by blockchain technology, applying it to a case of first use highly advantageous for our industry. This will allow us to implement and take advantage of the benefits identified during the experiment to facilitate the operation of all companies. Our ambition is to continue with other projects to allow us to make use of such a powerful, practical and effective technology, not only for insurance companies but for the entire market.”
