Maersk Begins Commercial Use of Marine Insurance Platform Insurwave

A.P. Moller–Maersk Group, a Danish business conglomerate with interests in transport, logistics and energy sectors, has started commercial use of Insurwave, a blockchain powered maritime insurance platform jointly developed by EY and Guardtime.

According to Seatrade Maritime News, Insurwav platform was built using distributed ledger technology provided by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. It can be remembered that Microsoft announced the launch of its Azure cloud based blockchain platform Workbench in early May.

The platform, which complies with global insurance standards, will be used by Maersk to manage as many as 1,000 vessels in the first year. Furthermore, the platform will support over 500,000 digital ledger transactions.

Commenting on the commercial use of Insurwave, Lars Henneberg, the head of risk and insurance at Maersk said

“marine insurance takes up considerable resources for us. Moving it to [Microsoft Azure] 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.”

In addition to Maersk, Insurwave blockchain platform is also used commercially by Willis Towers Watson, MS Amlin, and XL Catlin. Guardtime, Microsoft, and EY are planning to extend the use case of the platform to global logistics, marine cargo, and aviation and energy sectors in the future.