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The financial services industry is constantly seeking ways to enhance digital ecosystems and leverage new technologies for a competitive edge. Blockchain technology has shown promise, but the path from discovery to implementation is often unclear. The challenge lies in finding practical uses for the technology and the right go-to-market approach. A significant proof-point of blockchain’s viability for trade finance is komgo, a blockchain-based commodity trade and finance network. However, the challenge for blockchain networks is the protection of private information on the ledger. As networks scale, they need mechanisms that allow for larger sets of blockchain validators. Business consortia also need the ability to govern the digital smart contracts where the business logic is executed.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative®, the largest enterprise-level blockchain consortium in the risk management and insurance industry, identified a significant challenge in the surety industry. The industry is characterized by multi-party data verifications and exchanges between the principal, obligee, and surety, which often leads to inefficiencies and complexities. The Surety Bonds Power of Attorney use case was identified as a starting point to address these issues. However, the process of enabling real-time bond signature and verification, which is crucial to the overall solution, was fraught with difficulties, including high costs, time consumption, and risk.

The fantasy gaming industry, a multi-billion dollar market, is dominated by a few large companies such as ESPN, Yahoo, FanDuel, and DraftKings. These platforms allow fans to select players, form teams, join leagues, and compete against other users. However, the value generated by these games largely remains with these big companies, with users and athletes having limited opportunities to monetize their participation. Furthermore, users have no real impact on the performance of their roster. This situation presented an opportunity for innovation and disruption, which is what Cydisys aimed to achieve when they partnered with Kaleido to create AnteFame, a blockchain-backed play-to-earn game centered around Formula 1.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, in partnership with Nationwide, Prudential Financial, and Securian Financial, faced the challenge of efficiently processing death benefits and claims. The existing process was inefficient and manual, requiring comprehensive decedent information for verification and validation of death claims. However, no single source had emerged to fill this need. The challenge was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the timely closure of life insurance and annuity claims more critical than ever. The lack of a centralized, secure, and transparent system for sharing decedent information among insurance carriers posed a significant challenge.

The healthcare sector is a complex ecosystem that requires seamless coordination and collaboration between various participants including doctors, clinicians, nurses, administrative staff, and patients. However, the lack of proper coordination and collaboration often leads to administrative waste, which is estimated to exceed $200B annually in the US. This inefficiency accounts for up to 34% of total healthcare costs. The costs are even higher when considering the real health consequences of delayed or improper diagnosis due to misinformation. Furthermore, the healthcare sector deals with sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which cannot be shared outside of the immediate network. Therefore, healthcare workers need to have confidence in the data they use, and healthcare organizations need to ensure data integrity and know that the data was not tampered with.

The Life & Annuities industry faces significant challenges in data sharing during the death notification process. Deceased individuals often have overlapping financial products across multiple carriers, leading to potential matching of these deceased individuals among the carriers' claims records. This situation creates a need for a secure, efficient, and timely data exchange system. The process of notifying all parties holding a policyholder's policy upon their death is time-consuming, costly, and risky. Furthermore, when a deceased individual had policies or financial instruments with more than one carrier, a median of a 55-day gap in payment exists for the second carrier payout. This delay indicates that one carrier often learns of the death earlier than others, highlighting the need for a system that can expedite the death benefits process.

The life insurance industry has been grappling with the challenge of not having a single, reliable source of truth for processing death benefits and claims. This lack of a centralized system has led to multiple handoffs between different systems and people, which not only increases the time taken to process claims but also escalates the cost and risk associated with it. The absence of a unified platform also places an unnecessary burden on the beneficiaries, who often have to navigate through complex procedures and multiple points of contact to claim their benefits. The industry was in dire need of a solution that could streamline the process, reduce the cycle time, and make it more efficient and less cumbersome for all stakeholders.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, a large enterprise-level blockchain consortium in the risk management and insurance industry, faced a challenge with the carrier to carrier data sharing of a first notice of loss (FNOL). This process was resource-intensive and time-consuming, leading to increased claims cycle time and handling costs. The consortium needed a solution that would facilitate early and accurate notice of loss data exchange between the relevant carriers’ claims systems. The solution had to be intuitive, easily blend into existing business processes and environments, and run on a platform that could be set up quickly and easily updated. It also needed to allow users to create, update, and match loss records with another network participant in a permissioned manner, privately sharing information and reducing data reconciliation issues between disparate data systems.

The healthcare industry is facing a significant challenge in terms of interoperability. With the introduction of federal legislation promoting the adoption of electronic health records, software vendors rushed to provide solutions. However, these solutions often maintain data in silos, without a common approach for coordination with other solutions. Electronic health data exists in standardized file formats that can transmit various types of medical information, but without interoperability, the benefit of this data is greatly diminished. The lack of interoperability makes it difficult to move files from one place to another in a manner that is useful or meaningful. Traditional solutions, such as enterprise integration platforms, have attempted to address this issue, but they often leave data locked inside siloed systems within each participating organization. This approach also struggles to keep data in sync and maintain a single source of truth with a proven audit trail.