According to International Business Times, the Japanese insurance company Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance in partnership with NTT DATA Corporation has completed testing the first blockchain-based insurance policy for marine cargo insurance certificates.
Tokio Marine said its proof of concept created a “data” bill of lading, letter of credit and a commercial invoice on a blockchain, and tested this from the perspective of a shipper that needs a certificate of insurance in order to satisfy the insurance requirement on the letter of credit. The system imported the necessary data from the “data” bill of lading, letter of credit and a commercial invoice to create a certificate of insurance.
With blockchain technology, the company expects to reduce the shipper’s data inputting work load: “It was actually proven that the blockchain based system will cut 85% of the shipper’s time of data inputting work in order to receive an insurance certificate. It was also tested in terms of accessibility from the parties concerned, such as consignee and banks,” said Tokio Marine in a statement.
The innovation brings other benefits, such as optimization of the work-flow of the trade, making everything run faster, more efficiently and working out much cheaper.
Tokio Marine also performed an attack to the blockchain data to see how the system would react. Fortunately, it performed successfully: . “When one block was attacked and rewritten, the tampered block was not distributed to other nodes and it became obvious that there was inconsistency compared to the other nodes. It also showed that the whole blockchain system still worked with the legitimate data even though one node was attacked,” said Tokio Marine.
Finally, the article mentioned that NTT DATA Corp is involved in forming an international consortium with shipping companies, freight forwarders, banks and insurers.
