Consulting giant EY and Guardtime, along with a number of industry participants, have launched a marine insurance blockchain platform – Insurwave.

Insurwave, a blockchain platform to support marine hull insurance, is the result of a joint venture between EY and Guardtime. It leverages blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and ACORD data standards. A.P. Moller - Maersk contributed to the development of the blockchain technology as a pilot client and is continuing on the platform with its marine hull portfolio.

"We are very proud of the work we have done with EY in developing this platform, beginning with a proof of concept a year ago and then all the way through to this production release. This represents an important milestone not only for the insurance industry but also for blockchain technology, proving it can deliver real value to enterprise customers,” Mike Gault, Guardtime CEO, said.

According to the official release, EY, Guardtime, A.P. Møller-Maersk, Microsoft and insurance industry leaders Willis Towers Watson, XL Catlin, MS Amlin and ACORD have announced that the members of the marine industry are using the blockchain-based solution. This follows the initial announcement made in September 2017 when the project participants launched the blockchain solution after a 20-week proof-of-concept phase.

Insurwave will support over half a million automated ledger transactions and help manage risk for more than 1,000 commercial vessels in the first year. It will help connect participants in a secure, private network with an accurate, immutable audit trail and services to execute processes, thereby establishing a digital insurance value chain.

The first phase of the platform rollout is focused on marine insurance. However, project participants EY, Guardtime and Microsoft plan to roll it out to other types of business insurance for the marine cargo, global logistics, aviation and energy sectors.

[Update: The fourth para has been edited to include additional information].