IDEI Distinguished Research Seminar Series

It is well known by now that blockchain has become one of the frontiers in information technology with its main and unique feature as a trust machine as stated by the Economist in 2015. However, few people truly understand the ins and outs of machine trust, brought to the real world by blockchain. In this talk, the speaker will use long-term care insurance as a use case to explain several aspects of machine trust, by showing how blockchain can be implemented in the insurance business that is characterized by complicated transactional interrelationships among various stakeholders involved in insurance activities. Given this unique nature, the century-old challenge in the insurance industry is to effectively reduce transaction costs among the stakeholders while maintaining business privacy and trust. To address the technical challenges, an innovative blockchain based technical model, InsurModel, was proposed in the context of newly initiated long-term care insurance in China. To certain degree, InsurModel is an instantiation of trust machine in the insurance context.