Marsh Expands IBM Collaboration to Provide Blockchain Proof of Insurance to More Clients Through Salesforce Platform

New York, NY (Sept. 30, 2018) – Marsh, a global leader in insurance broking and innovative risk management solutions, announced today that it is expanding its collaboration with IBM^[1] to provide clients with wider access to the industry’s first commercial blockchain solution for proof of insurance.

By using blockchain technology, Marsh and IBM are working together to transform the certificate of insurance process from complicated and manual, to streamlined and transparent, allowing clients to speed up necessary business functions such as hiring contractors.

Leveraging the IBM Blockchain Platform and IBM’s strategic relationship with Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, Marsh will work with IBM to extend its commercial proof of insurance blockchain solution to be directly accessible to Marsh clients through the Salesforce Platform.

The new initiative will be demonstrated today at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2018, taking place in San Francisco.

Commenting on the expansion, Sastry Durvasula, Marsh’s Chief Digital, Data, and Analytics Officer, who will be speaking about the new collaboration at Dreamforce, said: “By making proof of insurance accessible digitally and instantaneously for our clients through Salesforce, we are streamlining a key business requirement through easy and secure sharing of proof of insurance.”

A distributed ledger technology, blockchain establishes a shared, immutable record of all the transactions that take place within a network and then enables permissioned parties access to trusted data in real-time. Since proof of insurance is a key business requirement in many industries, this blockchain solution allows the creation of a network of networks to provide verification on a much broader scale.

“Distributed ledger technologies are driving efficiency across many industries by enabling legacy manual processes to operate more efficiently and with greater transparency and trust,” said Sandip Patel, General Manager, Insurance Industry, IBM. “This innovation is an ideal example of how blockchain can be used to drive real business results and collaboration in the insurance industry.”

In April, Marsh announced^[1] the first commercial proof of insurance solution, in conjunction with IBM, with input from insurance standards leader ACORD and customer feedback from ISN, the global leader in contractor and supplier information management. The blockchain is built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric technology and IBM Blockchain Platform.

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Notes

1. Marsh Collaborates with IBM, ACORD, and ISN to Apply Blockchain Technology for First Commercial Proof of Insurance (Apr. 16, 2018).

About Marsh

A global leader in insurance broking and innovative risk management solutions, Marsh’s 30,000 colleagues advise individual and commercial clients of all sizes in over 130 countries. Marsh is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC), the leading global professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy and people. With annual revenue over US$14 billion and nearly 65,000 colleagues worldwide, MMC helps clients navigate an increasingly dynamic and complex environment through four market-leading firms. In addition to Marsh, MMC is the parent company of Guy Carpenter, Mercer, and Oliver Wyman.

About IBM

IBM is recognized as the leading enterprise blockchain provider. The company’s research, technical and business experts have broken barriers in transaction processing speeds, developed the most advanced cryptography to secure transactions, and are contributing millions of lines of open source code to advance blockchain for businesses. IBM is the leader in open-source blockchain solutions built for the enterprise. Since 2016, IBM has worked with hundreds of clients across financial services, supply chain, government, retail, digital rights management and healthcare to implement blockchain applications, and operates a number of networks running live and in production. The cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform delivers the end-to-end capabilities that clients need to quickly activate and successfully develop, operate, govern and secure their own business networks. IBM is an early member of Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. For more information about IBM Blockchain, visit www.ibm.com/blockchain/.

Source: Marsh