 Hello, everyone, thanks for joining us. Today, Restream Collaborative and Collider will be jointly presented on a panel to talk through some lessons learned in the insurance industry. Restream, we'll get to meet Pat and talk a little bit more about what they do and some of the industry learning. And Collider will talk about some of the blockchain and technology learnings. So just to start with the speaker intro, Pat, if you'd like to start with some words about your background. Sure, thanks for having me. I'm Pat Schmid. I'm the vice president of the Institute's Restream Collaborative, which is a risk management and insurance blockchain consortium. I oversee Restream's core business, including our products, our relationship management, our operations, and our technology departments. And through these lenses, I work with our team to coordinate the Restream consortium of insurers, brokers, and reinsurers, and work with staff, members, and technical partners such as Clido in developing production-ready applications that can lower costs, improve the insurance experience, and hopefully drive efficiency across the industry. Thanks, Pat. We're really happy to have you here today. I'm Steve Cervini. Great to be with you today to be talking about blockchain and insurance. I'm the CEO of Clido. I'm joined by my fellow co-founder, Sophia. So always great to be tag-teaming with you. And Clido is a technology vendor in the blockchain space that's really specialized on enterprise-grade SaaS solutions, hosting of node infrastructure, and other off-chain components that enterprises need to really build and deploy the sort of solutions like what we're going to be talking about in this time. Thanks, Steve. I think just a little bit to add about our backgrounds. We have been in enterprise blockchain space from the very beginning. Steve launched the world's first blockchain as a service platform, and would work with hundreds of clients, executive ownership of some significant advances in the space from some of the leading vendors. So I think just in terms of what we're looking to accomplish in the panel, some of the industry's best practices lessons learned from the insurance industry across years of consortium building and governance and getting into some of the architectures and management and operation as well. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Pat, who's going to kick it off with a view on the insurance industry drivers and talk about restraining collaborative and what they've been doing in the space. Sure. So thanks again for having me. It's our opinion at the institutes. We feel that the technology behind blockchain and distributed ledger is network driven enterprise usage of this provides a means to work on shared business processes or multi-party business processes and challenges associated that in our industry plague the insurance industry and add cost. But it also, in our opinion, requires for competitors to get together requires a nonpartisan Switzerland type arbiter to kind of bring the industry together to test and learn about the technology and implement it. So the institutes risk stream collaborative emerged out of the institutes which is a not-for-profit educational entity was formed over 100 years ago out of the Wharton School and more than 100,000 learners annually on, generally on risk management insurance topics. Its board of directors include chief executive officers who represent a majority of domestic insurance premium volume in PNC and whose organizations also have a sizable international presence. So if you need a network for private permission or enterprise blockchain the institutes already has one established within the PNC space. So to establish the same type of arrangement in the life and annuities insurance area the risk management or the risk stream collaborative teamed up with an organization called LEMRA, a risk management research and professional development trade association for the financial services industry. The risk stream collaborative is the largest which formed out of the institutes is the largest insurance blockchain consortium with over 30 member companies and a broader emerging ecosystem. Our members include well-known insurers like travelers, Liberty Mutual, nationwide, USAA, Securian, brokers. I think we have a slide on this too. Brokers like Marsh, Truist, and Reinsurers like Everstree and Renry. I think we have a slide on this, Sophia, if we advance forward. So it just backtracking for just a second. We're the largest blockchain consortium with over 30 member companies and a broader emerging ecosystem. Again, our members include well-known entities like travelers, Liberty Mutual, nationwide, USAA, Securian, brokers like Marsh, Truist, Aeon, and Reinsurers like Everstree, Renry. We are a separate 501C6 not-for-profit that has been working on blockchain and DLT application for the last few years. Today we operate as a consortium that is using this network of member companies to develop industry specific blockchain applications. And our goal is to develop these applications for a variety of use cases across the industry. So while our activity for the consortium really began in the property casualty insurance space with kind of the institutes as the sponsor, the life and annuities industry is starting to catch up as well. Restream membership, which are carriers, distributors, or reinsurers, they pretty much lead all areas of our consortium's governance and activity. For example, the members and leadership work to prioritize use cases and launch working groups on those use cases. These groups, in turn, design use cases and then work with staff and folks like Kaleido to build out the associated applications. So while all of our efforts at Restream have really centered around our membership, the consortium, as demonstrated on this slide, has started to create a larger ecosystem. And our goal is to position providers, builders, connectors, or enablers, not for profits, which we describe as kind of associations, consortia, or academia, collaborators, which could be any entity that touches the insurance space. And when you think about that, that's an awful lot of industries that really touch the insurance space. And then we define these as civics, which are basically regulators, departments of insurance, and government. And our hope there is to really start to establish an ecosystem. So that goal is to position those parties to help consortium members devise solutions and shared business processes, across shared business processes within the risk management and insurance space. So finally, our use cases are decentralized applications for blockchain really stretch across a variety of areas of insurance. For example, we have use cases in personal auto for proof of insurance verification and first nurse of loss data sharing. Cases in commercial lines, we'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment, on certificates of insurance for verification, surety bonds for power of attorney verification. We have use cases in reinsurance for placement and border reporting. And finally, we'll focus a little bit on life and annuities use cases, like mortality monitor, which looks into sharing of certain information related to policy holders who passed away and licensing and appointments. You can kind of get a good view of our ecosystem from this slide and how all the different parties are really interacting with one another. This goes kind of hand in hand with the previous slide. If we advance down to the next slide though, I think we've been on quite a journey within risk stream. We worked with a variety of different solution providers across our journey, which started really in, I think actually late 2016, we became founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance at the time. We worked with consensus and building out for proof of concepts initially. We went back to that board, again, the board of the institutes at the time, which is comprised of about 40 to 50 CEOs representing a large percentage of the insurance industry. And they came back and they said, okay, build these for proof of concepts but also show us that the industry even wants to work together on this. And we demonstrated that we moved forward and developed a platform which we called Canopy 1.0, which is a private permissioned version of Ethereum. We did so with Deloitte, built out a few applications there. We extended that further, started building out what we call Canopy 2.0, which was built around Corda. We worked with Accenture, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young on a variety of elements related to that. But all along, we had a vision of a blockchain interoperable structure that we could leverage as an industry. And around this time, we really met Kaleida. And we recognized the fact that they were building or had built something that we were aiming to build. And therefore, we started to team up on something we call Canopy 3. And we're really excited about it because we feel it fulfills our vision for blockchain with an insurance, providing a low-cost method that's truly underlying blockchain, agnostic to enterprise blockchain. Canopy was created to provide a backbone for various blockchain or DLT apps in insurance to be built upon. It allows for efficient build, easy stand-up of new apps using simple APIs. It's SOC2 certified, ISO certified. We've worked with our members to go through SIG processes, and we're excited to say that our platform is certified. We've also become much more efficient at standing up nodes. They're now click-button and now have a hosted node option. And as we've highlighted, Kaleida's platform is platform agnostic. So it's potentially possible to build applications on Corda, Ethereum, and of course now Hyperledger. So we're super excited about that because a lot of the industry initiatives have been built on separate different types of blockchains and we want to bring them together. So we're very excited about the potential even down the road for our industry members to build their own use case. So it's been a great teamwork getting to this point. And now I think the last slide that we have here on my side before I hand it over to Sophia and Steve is that we're building applications across insurance. And this slide gives you a good perspective on that. In personal auto, one of the first things that we're all familiar with is when we're stopped by a law enforcement officer or we're involved in an accident, we pull out our paper card. And we all know that now the insurers have the ability to use applications to showcase that you have proof of insurance. The problem with that is it's not up to date. And there's no way to transmit that to another party. We build out a ability for us to transmit after an accident between different parties on our network. So for example, if USAA enters into their mobile application and nationwide it enters into theirs, there's a potential to transmit and verify insurance coverage on the spot. Not only peer-to-peer, but also peer-to-law enforcement officer and so on. We've also built out a first notice of lost data sharing application which allows our member companies, once they get notified of an accident, to enter into their existing claim system, which we're using using GuideWire as an example here and register that share via the blockchain, the DLT, who that other carrier is. So for example, if it comes in to, I don't know, USAA and they entered into their GuideWire system and the other party involved was nationwide, it literally will populate in the nationwide claim system and there's reconciliation back and forth between the two parties, therefore cutting down on the time spent on the phone between the different parties, trying to get more information on the claim. We've also built out applications in the commercial line space and I'll run through this very quickly. There are 30 bonds which is an international effort on power of attorney verification. It's probably the lead there. In reinsurance, we're looking into border row reporting and placement and life and annuities. We work closely with Kaleido on a project called the Mortality Monitor which allows for carriers to share information on a policyholder who's passed away amongst one another. And we found with only three carriers, 4% of the time there is overlap between a policyholder who may have had an annuity with someone like nationwide and might have a retirement account, an individual life policy or a group life policy with an organization like Securian. So that's quite an amount of time just between three parties and we anticipate that that would grow. But more importantly, when the first party pays, there's normally at least a 60-day on a median, 180-day on an average day delay between when the second party pays. So in order to make that much more streamlined beneficiary experience, you should share the data between the different carriers. And we built a solution to do that and also incentivize it using tokens. So I'm going to turn it over to Sophia and Steve now to talk a little bit more about what they do and how they've worked with us. Thanks, Pat. And before we transition, I did want, I know one question we've been asked is with COVID over the last year, how do you see this affecting some of the work you're doing around this digital transformation space with the insurers? That's a great question. I think that the pandemic has certainly affected the insurance industry. Digital transformation was very important pre- and post-pandemic. For example, there was an organization and the insurance space called AMBest that was coming out within their credit rating agency, coming out with an innovation rating. So that was happening. I feel like it's undeniable that the pandemic and the associated policies afterwards have expedited some of the change. I mean, we've all been working from home. So the pandemic response kind of led to declines in driving in many other areas that affected insurance for sure. But moreover, the broad access to the internet, the work from home tools allowed insurance workers to work from home and maintain connection to company systems through cloud-related services and other technologies that allow for continuation of business and reasonable security. And for some companies, I think that really started to really underscore the value in a digital roadmap. But not only a data, internal data policy, but also start to formulate what's your external data strategy. So for some companies, I think the digital roadmap was somewhat paused because of the pandemic. But for others, I think it actually expedited the need to move forward and faster. And given the online, automated environment that we were all operating within. So on net, I think the low interest rate environment certainly affects insurers that traditionally invest in conservative assets leads even more so to a need for to lower operating costs within the industry in order to remain profitable. So all these different factors kind of coming to a head, I think has expedited in some ways some of the desire to move forward with a digital roadmap. And I think obviously one of the causal factors there was the pandemic. That's great. Yeah. And another one we actually got before this session was given you have over four years in this space and more than two dozen blockchain use cases, is there any advice you'd have for the hyperledger audience? I think that listening to the market is very relevant for us. We've really tried to degrade use cases on desirability, feasibility and viability and look into where use cases can work. Another thing that we've done internally is develop something we call risk stream labs which allows us to move through use cases and see if there's market interest because it's really hard to know in advance before you start kind of working groups how relevant the use case is going to be and what the potential ROI is. So what we've done instead is started a process to develop the applications utilizing very carefully a minimal amount of risk stream resources, product managers, project managers and just get enough to see if the industry really wants to fund the use case development and if they do want to fund that use case development they're putting stake in the game and they're showing the value of what we could do next. And that's I think really helped us become more operationally efficient internally but also focus on use cases that have likely the most bang for the buck for the industry players because that's a big challenge is knowing where to start. There's lots of potential use cases for this technology and knowing where the areas that we really should focus on is a challenge. So that would be one area of advice that I would have for other consortia. Pat, I think that's extremely helpful for people. Thanks for sharing. I guess just transitioning to some of the technical lessons learned we've worked across all industries with the leading blockchain networks and consortia. One common pattern we see is that people embark on a blockchain project but about five to 10% is the actual blockchain you know the data on the chain the logic on the chain and it's a very important part of the solution it's what provides a decentralization a lot of the benefits people are looking for but typical projects have up to 40 components on the off-chain stack and you know looking at the apps in middleware layers so when you're looking at really going to market with a blockchain solution it's important to realize there's a full stack of technologies and that's you know the blockchain's a beating heart and you look at the data the transaction's happening but there's also the middleware application and then the business operations and then the DevOps as well. So Clido was really built for this in mind we're almost four years ago making looking at bringing these business networks together making that radically simple and for enterprise Pat mentioned some of the benefits to risk stream of that we do work across cloud and hybrid across multiple protocols so wanted to let everyone know that Pat mentioned that was important for their members because they're looking at a variety of two dozen use cases across all of these you know protocols and I want to provide that flexibility and choice so you can get to the right use case and the right of the business value they're looking for looking at solving the problem of bringing consortia together really drove a certain you know data model and a lot of choices from the ground up so you get all of those tools and that includes for network operators such as risk stream just that multi-party platform and providing a control plane, data plane and where members you know own their resources and those are all private and isolated so there's a variety of plug-and-play components you need you know and the way the on and off chain pieces come together is extremely important we've learned a lot we've actually as I mentioned in the intro been in the enterprise blockchain space since the very beginning 2015 so I've seen you know the second generation of blockchain projects coming through such as the ones that risk stream collaborative is leading and there's a lot of learnings in there for the community with that I'll pass to Steve and he'll talk about some of the learnings and how that's translating to open source exciting news at Hyperledger Sophia you know in transitioning at Clota we have a deep commitment to open source communities we think the end value for our customers is tremendous and so we've been very active over our entire existence you know in some of these awesome projects that are out there and that spans across blockchain protocols as well as some of the emerging off-chain technologies you know standards work around tokens and other things I wanted to spend you know just the last couple of minutes to let you know that there's something really exciting that's being announced this week at the Hyperledger Global Forum and that's a new emerging initiative called Firefly and Sophia if you move on I believe and I may be a little bit biased because we're quite involved in this new project but we believe that Firefly really helps solve some missing pieces in the puzzle that have been really difficult you know for some of the first movers and earlier adopters Pat was talking about the journey the risk stream has been on in the insurance space and that's multifaceted there's the business side of it but there's the technical side as well and the evolution of their technology stack and the value that that has for their members on that we see there's a certain amount of plumbing right for a lack of a better term but all blockchain networks need to build really as a side effect of trying to go build your use cases and that plumbing exists around the chain Sophia you were talking about how you know those 40 components most of them are not the blockchain they're alongside on top sometimes underneath of the blockchain things like getting events, triggering events and triggering actions and thinking about business processes it spans multiple parties and there's a tremendous amount of plumbing to deliver data and events and messages reliably across party and also privately into your back office and so Firefly is a new initiative almost like a next generation approach that you may have heard the term in the industry a multi-party system but we see Firefly fulfilling this larger goal of giving you something to build on that's not those low level blockchain a protocol type interfaces it's a very simple API that spans across off chain and on chain components and then there are a set of infrastructure run times that again is broader than the blockchain itself that our companion to the running blockchain and so all of that together gives you a system to build upon that takes a lot of that plumbing that the nasty plumbing that's sort of almost like a dirty secret in our space on the technical side of an unforeseen challenge takes that off the table and can it really accelerate building out of your use cases if you go on again Sophia zooming in a little bit to the Firefly node and this code is out there in the Hyperledger community and you can go check it out yourself and sort of read up on the docs there's a lot of excitement about this project I think folks have been talking about the gaps and the need for this for some time we've heard from some of the in fact some of the texturing committee members of Hyperledger itself that was the case but looking quickly under the hood you know there are a number of components that are designed in a micro service architecture very easy to run infrastructure it sits on top of Kubernetes very nicely it's organized into a core which gives a clean API to build your application against there's a second layer of connectors and the community is mobilizing around these connectors and we're starting to see even just launching this project today publicly already seeing folks coming forward interested in helping to contribute connectors into their infrastructure run times of course the blockchain node is an important infrastructure run time it's still there front and centered providing global ordering finality a lot of the core values of a blockchain but Firefly is sort of providing the larger piece so if you want to learn more there is and I was just mentioning that Firefly is designed to be multi protocol as well for that running a blockchain so you can see support across sort of the big three if you want to learn more about Firefly I do want to say that you can there's an entire half day event this Friday and there's a link there where you can see the agenda you can come there's a hands on lab there's a tech overview where you can really go deep there's also a keynote that explains a bit more of the context and the backstory as well as the opportunity that Firefly presents for you so it's really good there's something for everyone there you can get to it through the Hyperledger Global Forum webpage itself I'm pasting up a link you can click through there participation is a part of the Global Forum itself so you can join through seamlessly there's also a direct URL that we have up on the screen here with the agenda really looking forward to any and all folks who can make it out so with that I'll turn it back to Sophia for any last words or thoughts, Pat as well and I want to thank everyone for attending thank you thank you Pat and Steve I know we did have a question I think we have about maybe a minute left if it makes sense to answer some of the questions Steve Eduardo asked is Firefly an alternative to blockchain and then Lino you're asking if Kaleido can provide a hybrid network out of the box or is it accomplished to consulting for Lino is an easy one yes you can create that out of the box it's an actual product so if you go on and try just go on to the Kaleido website and you can get started there we have a free trial Steve on the Firefly question from Eduardo is Firefly an alternative to blockchain maybe we can spend 20-30 seconds on that and then wrap up real quickly on the hybrid you can natively create managed nodes there sometimes folks say hybrid they mean that sometimes they mean a mix of SAS nodes and self-managed nodes Kaleido also has that through what we call private stack technology so some members can run self-hosted node anywhere and securely connect them with the rest of the members that are hosting the SAS on Firefly it's not an alternative to blockchain so there is a blockchain in the box we support the intention is to support all of the big three but you do need to select as your bootstrapping config as you start up a Firefly node you need to select a blockchain protocol it's just there it's running so the complexity of interacting with it is abstracted away from you and as Pat was saying really interesting to some of the leading blockchain networks out there the ability to either move from one protocol to the other is drastically simpler but also the ability to have multiple networks running side by side for different use cases implemented on different technologies so Firefly relies on the blockchain for key integrity elements of the data flows and the data exchanges it just brings along a lot of the plumbing that we see folks reinventing the wheel over and over again in the industry to do things like off chain private data exchanges messaging event synchronization and so on so it's that bigger system on top of the blockchain thanks Steve well a huge thanks to Pat I think what you are doing leading with risk stream collaborative is just a tremendous contribution to not just the insurance industry but a leading the path of all blockchain consortia so thanks thanks I know that's what you do every day thanks for coming to share some of the insights and your approach and plans we appreciate all the support your team has given us and we look forward to the collective road ahead I guess thanks for having me thank you everyone bye