Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technologies

As part of a PoC (proof of concept) developed for the client, a private Etherum blockchain was used to automate the reporting and billing processes for motor vehicle claims settlement. The solution even works across national borders. For instance, a person insured with a French insurance company reports an incident during a stay in Italy. The claim notification is received by the Italian branch of the insurer. Notification and invoice payment are mapped using blockchain technology. This is an example of how verifiable transactions can simplify cross-organizational clearing procedures.

A customer from the insurance industry was interested in blockchain technology when it was still in its infancy – metafinanz assisted them. The focus was on highly specialized reinsurance contracts, so-called catastrophe excess of loss (Cat-XL) cases. We implemented these by creating prototypes on the Ethereum, Monax and Hyperledger Fabric platforms. Our main tasks included the evaluation of these blockchain technologies to assess their practical viability, performance, usability, scalability, integration into enterprise infrastructures, and maintainability of the code.

A major regional energy supplier and electricity network operator commissioned metafinanz to investigate new business opportunities in the field of cooperative energy management in the context of blockchain technology and to assess their practical suitability. The company finally decided on an infrastructure based on local power exchange. metafinanz developed the matching concept, user stories, business architecture and alternative business models. We also built a prototype app, down to the visual design, for the administration and visualization of a marketplace.

A large international company wanted to offer its customers the option of settling outstanding invoice balances via Bitcoin in addition to common payment methods such as bank transfer. The use of crypto currencies facilitates rapid and low-cost handling of transactions, making them particularly attractive for use in countries where expensive or cumbersome banking procedures are the norm.

The goal of the implementation project was to create a solution for accepting Bitcoin payments conveniently and cost effectively via a third-party provider and to allocate payments to the right end customer. Another requirement was to directly convert incoming Bitcoin payments into conventional currencies and transfer these to a corporate account.

B3i started off in 2016 as a consortium of 15 insurance and reinsurance companies with the vision of leveraging blockchain technology for the benefit of all stakeholders along the value chain. In 2017, the first use cases based on real smart contracts, but populated with fictitious data, were presented to the public. This consortium has been transformed into a start-up company to better coordinate strategy, financing and development. For more details, visit www.b3i.tech.

As a member of the B3i development team, metafinanz helped design the architecture, performed organizational tasks and was in charge of Scrum mastering. We also developed part of the software and built the development and production infrastructure (DevOps).

The idea behind Pill Fairy is to bring together electronic prescriptions and medication regimens with the goal of digitizing and automating today’s manual processes that take place between patients, physicians, pharmacists and insurance companies.

The design of the Pill Fairy service is consistently based on the key concept of distributed data management. And the system ensures that patients retain control of all their sensitive data – not just in theory, but in a verifiable manner.

A sophisticated security concept embedded in a flexible identity infrastructure prevents fraud and ensures reliable authentication and the ability to verify all stakeholders and documents. The key component is a private blockchain to be operated by interested stakeholders (such as insurance companies) as a consortium.

Pill Fairy brings reliability and confidence to medication, while providing comfort and new application scenarios to patients. End-to-end digitization promises to deliver enormous cost savings to the insurance industry.