During the February 2021 AAIS Pulse newsmagazine, AAIS VP Truman Esmond was joined by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger, Brian Hoffman, Vice President State and Bureau Regulatory Affairs, at Travelers, and Arron Lamp, Vice President Enterprise Business Intelligence & Analytics & Operations, at Travelers, to discuss the obstacles and opportunities around leveraging open-source technology.

Accurate risk assessment is key to mitigating exposure and to unlocking underwriting opportunities.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Carrier Management Magazine on August 19, 2019.

I started my career as the first network administrator at the University of California, Davis. Part of my job was to help build the Bay Area Regional Research network, one of 10 National Science Foundation networks that, in 1986, became what we call the Internet today.

IBM, who has partnered with AAIS on the development of the openIDL data-management platform on blockchain, has long been a strong proponent of open-source software development. Chris Ferris, an IBM Fellow and CTO for Open Technology at IBM, spoke to AAIS’s Joan Zerkovich on the importance of the open-source concept and the powerful outcomes IBM has seen from building technology in an open environment.

Open source technology. Collaboration and cooperation to improve the products and technologies necessary to move innovation forward. Building a platform where new applications are welcomed to extend the tool’s use cases. These fundamental practices led to the creation of the Internet…and are being seen again as distributed ledger technology takes center stage.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, regulators quickly realized two problems. They would need to collect massive amounts of data and issue multiple data calls, particularly around business interruption, and there was no secure, efficient way to gather this data to truly understand the impact COVID-19 was having on the P&C market. With business interruption claims growing, a quick, effective solution was needed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly challenged the insurance industry, but NAMIC CEO Chuck Chamness believes our resilience, adaptability, and focus on emerging technologies like blockchain will help us to emerge stronger than ever.