Media company Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), insurance firm
NTUC Income (Income), and LumenLab, MetLife’s Asia innovation center, have
teamed up to pilot a blockchain platform aimed at automating the life insurance
claim process, the companies said
on Monday.
Using LifeChain, a technology developed by LumenLab, SPH
will encrypt and share verification data used for obituary placement with
Income to kick-start the claim process. The initiative is intended to provide greater
convenience to family members attending to a deceased’s administrative matters,
while streamlining the life insurance claim process.
Lifechain will begin piloting this month with 1,000 randomly
selected Income life insurance policyholders.
During the pilot, family members of a deceased who place
obituaries in SPH’s The Straits Times will be informed about Lifechain, and upon
their consent, the deceased’s National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) number
will be submitted into platform as hashed data to trigger a search for a
matching life insurance policy.
When a match is found, SPH will inform family members within
one working day, while Lifechain will send an automatic notification to Income
via email to initiate the claims process. If a match is not found, family
members will also be notified so they can proceed to make checks and file
claims with their life insurers accordingly.
Commenting on the initiative, Peter Tay, Income’s COO who
heads the company’s Digital Transformation Office (DTO), said that blockchain offers
greater transparency, enhanced security, improved traceability, efficiency and speed
of transactions, “value propositions [that] resonate with Income.”
“We are excited to be the first insurer to come on-board
Lifechain. We believe it will empower us to offer optimal protection of our
policyholders’ personal information while enhancing their customer experience
with Income,” Tay said.
Julian Tan, chief of digital business at SPH, said the media
company hopes to expand Lifechain to include more insurers in time.
“SPH aims to be the go-to partner for insurers to reach
policyholders’ beneficiaries, as soon as advertisers place an obituary in the
future,” Tan said.
“This initiative is also in line with our push for the digital
business, tapping on innovation and growing our partnerships to serve our
customers better.”
The Lifechain initiative is the latest blockchain project seeking
to use the technology in the insurance industry.
Allianz, for instance, piloted the use of blockchain and smart
contracts to accelerate the contract management process for catastrophe
(cat) swaps and bonds.
A collaboration of entities that includes EY, Guardtime,
A.P. Møller-Maersk, Microsoft, and ACORD, launched
blockchain-powered marine hull insurance platform Insurwave in 2018.
The platform is now in commercial use and was projected to
handle risk for more than 1,000 commercial vessels and 500,000 automated
transactions in its first twelve months of operation. The group plans to roll the
platform out to other types of business insurance in the future, including
cargo, aviation, and logistics.