Blockchain in Insurance: Compliance Concerns

By CIOReview | Friday, November 16, 2018

Blockchain has become incredibly popular in various industries, and the finance sector is no exception. The reason behind this connection of blockchain with finance is its advantage to enable quick and secure transactions. Insurance companies are incorporating the blockchain technology in their system for its simplicity with efficiency. Therefore, the blockchain is set to disrupt the insurance field by applying its applications and advantages.

Blockchain can minimize various costs by eliminating the need for intermediaries in financial transactions, but there are several other benefits that the industry is still discovering. In the case of online insurance brokers, the customers still call them through the phone for any inquiries about a service or to purchase an insurance policy. Although this medium is digital, the procedures are not always secure as they process through paper works on many occasions. But the adoption of blockchain by insurance companies has changed all these practices, and it has enabled them to minimize the amount of paper and manual work, nearly eliminating them.

The most significant area of compliance concerns of blockchain in insurance will be fraud detection and avoiding those frauds that happen in insurance services. Risk prevention is another important area that could leverage blockchain’s abilities with a secure ledger for insurance claims and policies. Similar to risk prevention, compliance also ensures the reduction of risks in a company with the acceptance of both principles and rules of the regulator or the organization.

Blockchain provides a well-organized system to insert smart documents or smart contracts by allowing safer, error-free connections and transactions with the customer or the insurance policyholder. Incorporating blockchain and big data has become one of the best practices of the insurance industry allowing organizations to ensure material efficiency and safe monitoring by the compliance officer, who will become capable of casting a net much larger than the previous with the help of a machine learning system.

Today, the exponential growth of new technological innovations is significantly disrupting many of the industries which have already existed in the market as well as industries which have recently emerged. Blockchain in the insurance industry is highly transforming the current scenario. However, as the technologies and trends change day-by-day, the future of the combination of blockchain and insurance will be more challenging, and technology disruptors will need to continuously involve in finding solutions for the same.