Pratap Tambe is the Head of BFSI Blockchain Consulting, UKI and Europe at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He has has 25 years of experience has been working in commercial insurance since 2011 and in blockchain with insurance since August 2015. In this podcast we discuss TCS partnership with B3i and how blockchain has evolved in the insurance industry since 2015.

 What is blockchain?Pratap looks at blockchain more from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective. He uses an example where traditionally a transaction is sent to one or more web servers run by one party. Typically, one server validates that transaction, processes it and saves it. In DLT, a transaction is sent to multiple servers run by different parties which validate the transaction and together run a consensus process. Successful outcome of the consensus results in the transaction being processed and saved.

In blockchain that transaction will be saved in a chain of blockchain which isn’t necessarily the case in DLT.

 Tata Consultancy ServicesTata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a 50 year old IT services company that is part of the Tata Group which has revenues of $106 billion. TCS has $22 billion worth of revenue from 470k global professionals that employs 36.4% women from a total of 147 nationalities.

 TCS partnership with B3i for ecosystems innovationsIn November 2020, TCS partnered with B3i to design, develop and launch ecosystem innovations based on DLT for the insurance industry.

Having worked in the London insurance market since 2011, Pratap is sharply aware of the difficulty competitors have in collaborating together. He believes that B3i has managed to launch a consortium blockchain of the ground with the participation of a number of those competitors.

B3i has developed a strong product vision and technology which requires a strong system integrator (SI) partner like TCS. As an SI, TCS plays a key role in enabling and scaling consortium blockchains to succeed.

TCS brings scaling up innovation, pipeline ideation and validation, product engineering, professional services and product support. These are natural services provided by a typical SI.

TCS already works with many global insurers and reinsurers across geographies from providing IT services support. Because of these relationships TCS brings unique value in helping blockchain consortiums provide back end integration into the blockchain to their customers and partners.

The role of the SI is to leverage its relationships to enable and support the baseline success of initiatives in core geographies of the blockchain consortium. Once that is achieved the SI is here to scale up innovation and delivery in core geographies and then to other geographies.

 Ecosystems of ecosystemsInsureblocks is a big fan of the notion of ecosystems of ecosystems. We perceive a future where we will see cross industry blockchain consortiums connecting and exchanging value between each other. For example, B3i could connect to PharmaLedger in the pharmaceutical space or to Marco Polo in the trade finance space.

Pratap states that B3i connecting with other blockchain consortiums is part of the agenda. He also states that this fits well within TCS strategy of driving ecosystems whether or not they use blockchain.

One current example that Pratap mentioned is asset or property data. The insurance industry has a lot of this kind of data in various formats and in varying quality of data. The insurance industry could cleanse this data, and leverage it with the appropriate consent to monetise this data to other industries.

Another example of cross industry collaboration is for healthcare industry consortiums interacting with a healthcare ecosystem.

 Blockchain in insurance since 2015In August 2015, Pratap published an article entitled “Blockchains and London insurance market?”. Back then he was a great fan of the potential of blockchain.