Despite raising tens of millions of dollars in funding and gaining the backing of several reinsurance giants, Investor Centre has been forced to shut down after it failed to raise additional capital in recent funding rounds. B3i was formed in 2016 by insurers and reinsurers to explore the potential of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) within the reinsurance industry.

Last year, 15 global insurers and reinsurers came together to form B3i with the single vision of leveraging blockchain technology to build an efficient worldwide reinsurance platform for market participants to cede, manage, and trade risk more easily.

B3i Tech Acquisition: What It Means for the Blockchain Insurance Sector

In October 2017 ,the group launched a prototype testing program, which saw 38 insurance industry participants, including insurers, broker,s and reinsurers, test the product. The prototype shows how the use of blockchain technology can improve efficiency by up to 30% in areas such as speed, quality, transparenc,y and security.

Meeusen explains that the prototype testing revealed many additional features that were required to make the product more compelling and that B3i has been working on to convert the prototype into a minimum viable product. The incorporation of the new legal entity will help to streamline the development, testing, and commercialisation of these products, he says.

In addition, the decision to adopt the R3 Corda distributed ledger platform was made as it was felt that this offered a greater level of sophistication in terms of data privacy and scalability than other open source blockchain technologies. The platform is designed to be fully integrated into the existing IT environments of B3i’s clients, Meeusen adds.