Global Insurance Giant Accenture Joins the Blockchain Bandwagon

Like many other financial institutions embracing the Blockchain technology, global insurance giant Accenture is now exploring its applications.

Accenture’s North American Managing Director of IT Strategy, Abizer Rangwala, made a blog post on January 4, 2016, outlining his vision regarding how his company is going to utilize the technology that made Bitcoin a reality.

“So here we stand at the dawn of 2016, looking forward to change and trying to predict whether Blockchain will indeed prove to be the next Internet-like change driver,” said Abizer Rangwala in the blog post. He went on to “aligned with those who see the use of Blockchain as continuing to gain momentum and expect it will have a profound effect on business.”

“This [using Blockchain in real financial applications] is starting to happen now,” added Mr. Rangwala.

The blog post mostly praised key features of the Blockchain technology and said that “the nature of Blockchain as a distributed database makes it difficult and prohibitively expensive to unilaterally edit, since so many copies exist” and “the blocks provide transparency.”

He also pointed out that the whole concept is still in its infancy and “effect of Blockchain for insurance products is a not as clear-cut.” However, he sounded optimistic about embracing the technology when he commented that he has “doubt that within the next few years it will be a major technology in the insurance ecosystem.”

Since Blockchain allows all stakeholders to conduct transactions directly without the need for any central third party database, it does not require any intermediary to reallocate any asset signature.

In the last two quarters of 2015 a lot of insurance companies already started working on developing proof-of-concepts for utilizing the asset allocation mechanism of Blockchain technology in their business, which include large insurers like Lloyd’s and Allianz.