Shipment and Logistics Giant Maersk Announces the Launch of Blockchain-based Marine Insurance ‘Insurwave’

AP Moller-Maersk, the Denmark-based shipment and logistics giant formally announced the commercial launch of Insurwave, the world’s first maritime blockchain platform. The Insurwave blockchain platform has been developed in a joint partnership by EY and Guardtime.

The platform makes use of the distributed ledger technology contributed by cloud platform Microsoft Azure and ACORD data standards. In addition to AP Moller-Maersk, the maritime insurance commercial platform is also being used by some other companies like Willis Towers Watson, XL Catlin and MS Amlin.

In the first year of its operation itself, Insurwave will support to manage over 1000 vessels and nearly 500,000 digital ledger transactions.

“By connecting participant in a secure, private network with an accurate, immutable audit trial and service to execute processes, the platform establishes a first-of-its-kind digital insurance value chain,” EY commented during the launch of the platform.

Although Insurwave is currently limited to be used only for maritime-insurance, EY and Guardtime said that they will be expanding the use of this platform for some other applications like global logistics, marine cargo, aviation and energy sectors.

Lars Henneberg, A.P. Møller-Maersk A/S Head of Risk and Insurance, says: “Our ambition is to drive the digital transformation of the transport and logistics industry and we see this platform as a testament to the value that can be extracted from streamlining areas of our industry that still rely on manual and often complex procedures.”

He further added: “Operating around 350 owned container vessels across the world, marine insurance takes up considerable resources for us. Moving it to this platform is helping us automate manual processes and alleviate a range of inefficiencies and frictional costs in the way we have used to trade marine insurance.”

Mike Gault, Guardtime CEO, says: “We are very proud of the work we have done with EY in developing this platform, beginning with a proof of concept a year ago and then all the way through to this production release. This represents an important milestone not only for the insurance industry but also for blockchain technology, proving it can deliver real value to enterprise customers.”

Shaun Crawford, EY Global Insurance Leader, says: “It is a proud moment for a number of heavy weight industry participants to be live with a genuine end-to-end blockchain platform in the specialty insurance market. All parties have worked extraordinarily hard, as a closely knit team, to get to this exciting milestone. To move from proof of concept just a year ago to a fully functioning platform that is delivering immediate value to clients feels exceptional.”