The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) has announced that it working on a blockchain solution for the insurance industry.

The solution is being developed in collaboration with IBM and Suncorp New Zealand. It aims to make the data transfer and payment reconciliation process faster and more transparent between brokers and insurers.

“Reconciling policy information and premium payments made by a broker to an insurer on behalf of customers is a slow and painful process,” Paul Goodwin, ANZ Managing Director Institutional NZ, explained. “The blockchain solution will be much more efficient for the industry as well as being very secure. As a ‘single source of truth’, it will provide greater visibility throughout the process, remove uncertainty and help make response times faster. This technology will work with existing industry solutions to capture relevant information; ensuring payments can be forecast and made without the need for reconciliation.”

ANZ and IBM have released a proof-of-concept white paper on the technology, describing how it will benefit the insurance industry.

According to the white paper, Hyperledger Fabric was used for the PoC, which successfully demonstrated the use of distributed ledgers for efficient data transfer without the need for multiple reconciliations and rekeying throughout a multi-party purchase of an insurance policy; consolidation into one data exchange system, giving clarity of the status of policies throughout their lifecycle; and automated allocation of receipts for bulk payments down to the individual policy/invoice level.

“IBM used design-led thinking principles and practices to reinvent the business processes behind intermediated insurance at ANZ,” said Mike Smith, Managing Director, IBM New Zealand. “The result is an interoperable network that could not only decrease policy costs and improve customer service, but also build a foundation for the introduction of other transformative technologies, such as artificial intelligence.”