RiskStream Collaborative Study Demonstrates Viability of Mortality Monitor

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, the risk management and insurance industry’s largest blockchain consortium, released a viability study validating the potential operational efficiencies for the Life & Annuities industry created by its Mortality Monitor application. The enterprise blockchain application aims to mitigate data-sharing challenges during the death notification process and assist carriers within the RiskStream Collaborative network in identifying potential deaths more quickly by incentivizing secure, permissioned data sharing. The informational exchange on a policyholder’s death with other parties also holding that policyholder aims to improve the beneficiary experience while reducing time, cost and risk to the carriers.

“Deceased individuals often have overlapping financial products across multiple Life & Annuities carriers, and there is potential for matching of these deceased individuals among the carriers' claims records,” said the author of the report, Patrick Schmid, VP of the RiskStream Collaborative. “The Mortality Monitor study sought to test the viability of the blockchain application’s carrier-to-carrier data exchange concept with a confined scope and small network of participants. The results of the analysis showcased the potential for the app to provide timelier access to information, lower cycle times and enhance the beneficiary experience.”

According to the report, three carriers provided five years of claims data for individual life, group life, annuities and retirement business. The findings showed that roughly 4% of the deceased policyholders from one of the carriers also had policies (individual or group) or financial instruments (annuities or retirement plans) with one of the other two carriers. This percentage was much higher than anticipated for three participating companies. The percentage would be expected to grow substantially with a much larger network, which is expected with a production rollout of the app.

The findings also showed that when a deceased individual had policies or financial instruments with more than one carrier, a median of a 55-day gap in payment exists for the second carrier payout. This finding indicates that it’s often the case that one carrier learns of the death earlier than others, so permissioned data sharing could expedite the death benefits process overall. RiskStream’s Mortality Monitor application on Canopy 3.0 running on Kaleido, leverages token economics to incentivize carriers to securely share a death notification with other competitors who have the same deceased party within their internal policy systems. The goal is to expedite the industrywide claims process and improving the overall beneficiary experience.

The Mortality Monitor’s single-source of truth concept sets the stage for a larger vision, extending the network participants to include entities who may have the original source of death information such as funeral homes, medical examiners, vital records, Electronic Death Registration Systems (EDRS) and government agencies. Inclusion of these data oracles is a next logical step to further expedite the process of providing death benefits to those left behind after a loved one’s death.

“A death claim beneficiary often has to go through significant effort reporting claims with each carrier for every line of business when they are going through one of their hardest times in life. Our members want to improve this experience industrywide,” said Bill Keogh, Non-Executive Chair of the RiskStream Collaborative. “Over the summer we plan to host several summits with our members, the broader Life & Annuities industry and their data providers. We will discuss the challenges with today’s processes and demonstrate the mortality monitor’s capabilities to assist the industry.”

Click here for the full Mortality Monitor Viability Study, and learn more about Mortality Monitor.