U.S. blockchain company Bitfury Group Ltd. today announced a partnership with Risk Cooperative, a risk and insurance advisory firm, to pioneer blockchain applications in the $60 billion insurance intermediation market.

Risk Cooperative hopes to apply Bitfury’s expertise and infrastructure to develop applications that will use cryptographically secured peer-to-peer ledger technology, or blockchain technology, for robust insurance platforms. The two companies also seek to spur the adoption of blockchain solutions across the insurance industry.

Valery Vavilov, chief executive officer of The Bitfury Group, said he believes “blockchain technology can bring transparency and security to the insurance industry” and that this partnership could be a catalyst for future insurance business models.

Bitfury maintains its own blockchain datacenter infrastructure with facilities around the world, including in Iceland, Finland and one being built in the Republic of Georgia. The company also offers Blockchain as a Service applications on its own infrastructure and platform expertise for companies to build their own with Bitfury’s servers and chips for blockchain technology.

This partnership with Risk Cooperative represents an ongoing expansion of Bitfury’s interests in using blockchain technology for data- and document-related uses. In March, Bitfury partnered with BestSign to build applications for digital document signing using the blockchain and in April, Bitfury signed on with the government of Ukraine for a full-scale blockchain e-government platform.

The financial technology industry has been eyeing blockchain technology for the past few years to provide security, privacy and validation to financial transactions. Industry leaders looking to build blockchain solutions include IBM Corp. with Hyperledger Fabric, PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. with the Vulcan Platform and the American stock exchange company Nasdaq Inc.

This interest arises from the financial industries expectation that blockchain technology can help not only secure and validate transactions but also lower the cost of “digital paperwork” and also greatly reduce the time it takes to process transactions. A PricewaterhouseCoopers report from April noted that 77 percent of the financial technology industry startups are expected to use blockchain technology by 2020.

According to Risk Cooperative the global insurance industry has a massive scale. The entire sector writes more than $5.5 trillion in annual premiums. However, manmade and emerging risks remain unfunded and underinsured. The company believes that this underinsurance challenge is hindered by legacy systems and older technology.

Dante Disparte, Risk Cooperative’s founder and chief executive officer, said he expects that with this partnership his company can serve as “first movers in driving blockchain adoption across the entire insurance value chain.”

Key attributes of the partnership include enhancing trust, transparency, efficiency and security in the origination, underwriting, quoting and transfer of insurable risk.

Once the partnership produces its first applications and platform, Bitfury and Risk Cooperative expect to demo the capabilities of blockchains for insurance and offer it as a foundation for the rest of the industry to model more widespread blockchain adoption.

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