Peter Miller spoke with Insider Engage at the Joint Industry Forum in New York.
Q: Could you update us on the RiskStream Collaborative?
A: The RiskStream Collaborative is a group of companies that got together — we are the sort of the Switzerland at the middle of, if you will — to develop distributed ledger or blockchain technologies for the industry. So it's an ongoing process. We've developed all the legal structures and all the agreements and to avoid antitrust [violations], built a platform based on blockchain technologies, and now have some apps and testing. So it's a very exciting time.
The members of the consortium drive the consortium, it's not for profit. And what we do is manage that and manage the creation of the apps.
Q: So it's kind of a nonprofit InsureTech?
A: That's exactly right. It's very exciting. Our first app is first notice of loss, which right now in the industry is largely a manual process to reconcile different versions of an auto accident. What this does is provides a data structure where everybody who's privy to that accident and has the right permissions can look at the at the data about that accident. So that will save time money for the insurance company and will give it a better customer experience. It'll shorten the claim cycle. And that's in testing now.
There are eight companies that are testing it. We anticipate in production in 2022. So it's been a process. But we're finally starting to see sort of the fruits of all that labor. It's very exciting.
Q: What's next for The Institutes?
A: We're looking at a lot of different things. One thing we're looking at that I find particularly interesting — I've an IT background — is non-fungible tokens. And if if you've heard of those, there's some really eye popping numbers around artwork and distribution of that. But again, just like blockchain, there's some there's some underlying technologies that really can be used to establish ownership or provenance, over time using non-fungible tokens around documents or pictures of different risks. So it's a pretty interesting concept, and we're starting to take a hard look at it.
