Yesterday Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) announced an expansion of its multinational capabilities including the adoption of a permissioned blockchain solution developed by ChainThat. BHSI can deliver insurance services to 178 countries.

BHSI adopted WorldLink to improve the efficiencies of the workflow for its multinational business. Worldlink is now used for 95% of its global insurance and is based on the insurtech ChainThat’s Beyond Multinational Programs platform. ChainThat estimates a potential 30% reduction in costs through efficiencies from its SaaS offering.

During the enterprise blockchain boom of 2018, insurance appeared to be one of the most promising business sectors. One of the key benefits of distributed ledger for corporates is enabling a single source of truth without yielding control. Sharing data in a permissioned manner reduces the time wasted in reconciliation. Insurance combines several parties (insured, broker, underwriter, reinsurer) and lots of changes (coverage, claims) making it essential to share data efficiently. The situation gets even messier for multinational business.

“ChainThat’s distributed ledger-centric platform supports consistency, compliance, and transparency in our multinational transactions, while delivering data clarity and protection across multinational accounts,” said David Valzania, Head of Multinational at BHSI.

“It enables BHSI to seamlessly coordinate and collaborate across local underwriters, producing offices, and network partners, facilitating the execution of our multinational programs.”

ChainThat is not a newcomer. Founded in 2015, Chainthat was an active player during the 2018 boom when it settled on R3’s Corda enterprise blockchain.

DLT adoption by insurance firms

However, it’s fair to say the insurance sector has been slow to adopt blockchain. Five years ago there were two large consortia, The Institutes’ RiskStream Collaborative and B3i involving 20 insurers. B3i shuttered in 2022. RiskStream  has persevered and so far has two live applications for auto first notice of loss (FNOL) and a parametric reinsurance offering with insurtech Arbol.

There are a few other exceptions such as another multinational solution developed by Allianz. Alongside ChainThat, other insurtechs leveraging blockchain include Nayms, Otonomi and TrustLayer.