Blockchain success shouldn’t hinge on disintermediation: ChainThat’s Edwards

In a marketplace where every level of the distribution chain is up for inspection, ChainThat CEO David Edwards speaks to The Insurer in the run-up to the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous about the next steps for RICAP (Risk meets Capital), the firm’s “broker-focused” blockchain project.

“RICAP is a utility that we’re creating for the insurance and reinsurance marketplace,” Edwards explained.

Unlike other blockchain initiatives that “have been very much focused on disintermediation,” Edward said that ChainThat’s tool aims to be inclusive of the entire marketplace, to address concerns that have been keeping industry executives up at night.

“We’re looking to address the expense ratios and the inefficiencies in the market and the way that companies do business with each other – from the broker, to the insurer, to the reinsurance broker, to the reinsurer, into the capital markets,” Edwards said.

The driver for a more cost-effective, efficient market will be intermediaries, according to Edwards.

“We see that brokers are going to be driving the market forward, so the approach that we’ve taken for RICAP is that we wanted to make it very much broker-focused,” he said.

The second prong to ChainThat’s strategy is focusing on hubs around the world, rather than making a “complete global play.”

“The way that we see it is that there are going to be hubs coming up around the world using common data standards. Then these hubs can interconnect with each other, just the way that the insurance market works today,” he said.

ChainThat that has already seen positive momentum across the pond, becoming the first insurtech to join the Bermuda Monetary Authority’s Innovation Hub in June, just before the roll-out of RICAP in July .

Looking to the future, the fate of RICAP will be decided by its users, Edwards told this publication.

“The success of the RICAP project is actually going to be measured by the participants,” he said, pointing towards pending feedback from the initiative’s steering committee.

“We’ve started a trial process with the participants… where they can look internally at their business and understand what are the practical efficiency gains that they can get from thi,” he said.

“Post the trial, we’re going to be measuring this against terms of the rate of adoption, looking at how this is taken up within the marketplace.”