A consortium of Indian life insurers, in collaboration with Cognizant, has announced that they have developed a blockchain solution to facilitate cross-company data sharing.

The 14 participating life insurers include SBI Life Insurance, Max Life Insurance, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance, Edelweiss Tokio Life, IDBI Federal Life Insurance, Birla Sun Life Insurance, HDFC Life, Kotak Life, Tata AIA Life, PNB MetLife, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Bharti AXA, Aegon Life, and SUD (Star Union Dai-ichi) Life Insurance.

The solution was developed late last year as part of a collaborative blockchain program undertaken by the consortium.

"As a shared source of truth, blockchain opens numerous possibilities for insurers to collaborate more effectively and transparently, make better informed decisions, and create greater trust and accountability, while disintermediating data aggregators," said Arun Baid, Global Delivery Head for Insurance, Cognizant. "Our comprehensive blockchain and domain capabilities built over the years have made us a trusted advisor for insurance companies to realize distributed ledger's full potential. We are proud to be a part of the consortium's vision to create a more secure, streamlined ecosystem that can accommodate disruptive business models of tomorrow."

The solution is built on R3’s distributed ledger platform Corda and hosted on Microsoft's Azure infrastructure.

By reducing the reliance of the insurers on data intermediaries and aggregators in obtaining customer and policy details, the blockchain solution will enable the insurers to deliver superior experience to customers through improved process efficiency, better record-keeping, and accelerated turnaround time. The solution will also help reduce the risk of data breaches, fraud, and money-laundering.

In addition, storing data on blockchain will enable participating insurers to reduce operating costs, avoid duplication of procedures, and streamline approvals, the release said.