Leading Indian Life Insurers Partner with Cognizant

Cognizant and a consortium of leading Indian life insurers — comprising 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 — announced that they have developed a blockchain solution to facilitate cross-company data-sharing. This will enable the insurers to reduce the risk of data breaches, fraud and money-laundering, while delivering superior experience to customers through improved process efficiency, better record-keeping, and accelerated turnaround time.

The solution, developed late last year as part of a collaborative blockchain program undertaken by the consortium, is among the consortium’s first distributed ledger initiatives. Built on Corda, a distributed ledger platform developed by R3 and hosted on Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure, the solution will help these insurers reduce their reliance on data intermediaries and aggregators in obtaining customer and policy details for a wide range of critical purposes, such as know-your-customer due diligence, financial and medical underwriting, risk assessment, fraud detection, and regulatory compliance.

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.