Cognizant and a group of Indian life insurers have developed a blockchain based solution to help insurers reduce the risk of data breaches, fraud, and money-laundering. The newly designed technology will facilitate secure data sharing among companies. 

The group of Insurance companies include, SBI Life Insurance, Max Life Insurance, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance, Edelweiss Tokio Life, IDBI Federal Life Insurance, Birla Sun Life Insurance, HDFC Life, Kotak Life, Tata AIA Life, PNB MetLife, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Bharti AXA, Aegon Life, and SUD (Star Union Dai-ichi) Life Insurance.

The blockchain solution will ensure data safety for the insurance companies at the time when cyber attacks are an increasingly common threat to the business. Recently, the data breach at Facebook had made a lot of news and even banks like Axis Bank and Punjab National Bank experienced cases of frauds. More solutions like these will safeguard the companies and the nations from more such breaches and frauds. 

Anand Pejawar, President, Operations, IT & International Business, SBI Life said, "Blockchain has the potential to catalyze a significant shift in the insurance industry's underlying technology and business models. With its model of immutable and decentralized data, and its ability to prevent tampered documents and false billings from falling through the cracks, blockchain can enable insurance providers to introduce new models, reinvent processes, and increase capacity.” 

In addition to ensuring real-time availability, transparency and consistency of records that can be audited at any time with easy traceability, storing data on blockchain will enable participating insurers to reduce operating costs, avoid duplication of procedures, and streamline approvals.

The solution is based on Corda, a distributed ledger platform built by R3 and hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. The technology, according to its markets, can enable insurers to reduce their dependence on data aggregators and intermediaries, which often makes them vulnerable to attacks and breaches.