The International Credit Insurance & Surety Association (ICISA) and The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, the risk management and insurance industry’s largest enterprise-level blockchain consortium, have announced a new working group for the Surety industry, which will attempt to streamline the power of attorney registration and verification process.
The working group is expected to launch meetings in early 2021. “The current process of registering, maintaining and verifying powers of attorney is expensive, time consuming and inefficient.” Said Rob Nijhout, executive director of ICISA. “We are proud of the work ICISA members have completed thus far and teaming up with RiskStream Labs is a natural fit to extend our contributions and make them available to the broader industry.”
“We’re excited about the opportunity to collaborate with ICISA and other surety associations and organizations in working to finalize design and build out a solution for power of attorney registration and verification. We feel the amount of use cases for blockchain and distributed ledger technology within the Surety Bonds sector are limitless, so the power of 
attorney working group is likely just the beginning,” said Christopher McDaniel, president of The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative. The working group will be facilitated by RiskStream Labs, a blockchain innovation hub designed to accelerate innovation across various sectors.
ICISA and RiskStream plan to extend outreach to other industry associations who have been aware of and are supportive of the use case for powers of attorney. In addition to the involvement of various surety associations, RiskStream member companies (consisting of carriers, brokers and reinsurers), non-members and other key industry players will be invited to engage in the first phase of the program. Greg Davenport, chair of ICISA’s Surety Blockchain Working Group, noted, “Many of the industry’s trade associations have envisioned a powers of attorney repository for a number of years. ICISA has invested the resources to demonstrate that Blockchain is the technology to finally enable such a repository for Europe, the United States, Canada, and other surety markets around the world.”
RiskStream Labs offers a path for networks to start application design, align on industrywide requirements, form network governance, complete proof of concept application build and move forward to production stages. Perhaps more importantly, RiskStream offers resources to help members study potential benefits for various blockchain applications. Participants feel the existing work done by the associations, along with RiskStream’s offerings may be the beginning of a significant international, industrywide Surety effort.
“We are delighted to help kick-start the first official surety working group within RiskStream Labs.” said Patrice Luscan, president of ICISA. “The core capability of blockchain is the network; taking a global approach that enables everyone to get in the game to solve business challenges provides the greatest potential and value. As an industry association, network related innovation is where we want to focus our efforts, as opposed to competitive innovation, which should remain in the hands of each of our members. It is therefore logical that we have championed blockchain for this POC, and probably others as well.”
The RiskStream Collaborative operates in property casualty (including surety), reinsurance and life & annuities areas. RiskStream aims to expand its network of members and connect insurance-oriented organizations to create greater efficiencies and achieve growth opportunities through blockchain innovations. “The surety industry is known for multi-party data verifications and exchanges between the principal, obligee and surety. Blockchain technology offers a potential solution to some of the pain points within these multi-party workflows,” said Patrick Schmid, vice president of the RiskStream Collaborative. “We believe that the power of attorney use case is a logical starting point and once it is complete, it will lead to many more downstream use cases.”
About The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™ is the risk management and insurance industry’s first enterprise-level blockchain consortium that brings together experts and developers to advance insurance specific use cases via Canopy, a custom blockchain architecture. The RiskStream Collaborative is committed to equipping organizations to work together to inspire product innovation, enable efficiencies, and open new technological frontiers.
About The Institutes Risk and Insurance Knowledge Group: The Institutes, the leading provider of risk management and insurance knowledge education and solutions, offer professional designations, including the CPCU® program. In addition, The Institutes provide introductory, foundational, and leadership courses and programs; online and continuing education courses; custom solutions; events and conferences; online and print news platforms; assessment tools; and research reports. CPCU is a registered trademark of The Institutes. All rights reserved.
About ICISA: The International Credit Insurance & Surety Association (ICISA) brings together the world’s leading companies that provide trade credit insurance and/or surety bonds. Founded in 1928 as the first credit insurance association, ICISA has been representing the surety sector since the 1950s. Today, with US$ 3 trillion in trade receivables insured and billions of dollars’ worth of construction, services and infrastructure guaranteed, ICISA members play a central role in facilitating trade and economic development on all five continents and practically every country in the world.
Source: ICISA Press Release
