MetLife USA adopts Ethereum to improve claims process

The largest insurance company in the United States, MetLife, is leveraging the Ethereum blockchain to increase transparency and efficiency in the claims process.

MetLife, founded in 1863, is a Fortune 100 company that serves 90 of the current Fortune 100 companies, with a presence in over 12 countries worldwide.

Its incubator in Singapore, LumenLab, is collaborating with Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and NTUC Income from Income Co-operative Insurance in Singapore to help families quickly determine if a deceased person qualifies for life insurance coverage on the Lifechain smart contract platform, automatically triggering claims.

A report indicates that the pilot project will run until October this year, randomly selecting 1,000 NTUC Income policyholders. When their families publish obituaries, they will be informed of the project, and if the families agree, Lifechain will encrypt the deceased's identity number using algorithms and place it on the chain.

This will prompt NTUC Income to search for the policy, and if a match is found, the family will be notified within a day, with Lifechain automatically notifying NTUC Income to initiate the claims process. The report suggests that this initiative could potentially revolutionize the entire insurance industry, creating new markets, products, and the ability to serve diverse customers at lower costs.

Zia Zaman, CEO of LumenLab, stated:

The use of blockchain technology is crucial, with security being one of its advantages. Moreover, if you try to adopt a technology that has been in existence for twenty years, you won't learn as seriously as when using a DLT system. We also realize that the implementation costs of blockchain are much lower compared to other methods.

In fact, this is not MetLife's first experiment with blockchain technology, nor its first use of distributed ledger technology. The company had previously collaborated with Lifechain to launch the Vitana application, which utilizes Ethereum smart contracts to pay out insurance claims to pregnant women with gestational diabetes.

However, there are still many issues for MetLife to address, such as scalability. The sample size during the experiment, with approximately only one thousand users, is not sufficient to significantly impact transaction volume on the blockchain.

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