B3i Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative

Category: Blockchain insurance · Reviewed by Mark Fox, Broker · Renewals · Last reviewed 2026-06-10

B3i (the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative) was an industry consortium of major insurers and reinsurers established in 2016 to develop common distributed ledger infrastructure for the insurance market, incorporated as B3i Services AG in Zurich in 2018 and placed in liquidation in July 2022.

B3i is the most-cited case study in blockchain insurance: it brought together direct competitors to build shared infrastructure, delivered functional pilots and a production-grade Property Cat XL platform, and ultimately failed to secure a viable funding model. Its outputs were partly open-sourced and continue to influence sector standards.

Definition

B3i was a Switzerland-headquartered consortium of insurers and reinsurers focused on developing distributed-ledger applications for the (re)insurance market. The consortium was established in October 2016 with five founding members and grew to fifteen shareholders by 2018. The founding cohort included Achmea, Aegon, Allianz, Ageas, Generali, Hannover Re, Liberty Mutual, Munich Re, RGA, SCOR, Sompo, Swiss Re, Tokio Marine, XL Catlin (subsequently AXA XL) and Zurich.

B3i Services AG was incorporated in March 2018 as the operational vehicle.

Legal / Regulatory basis

B3i operated within the existing UK and EU insurance regulatory framework. Its technology was a means of executing and recording contracts that remained governed by:

• Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and SI 2001/544 — for UK shareholders such as Aviva (later joined) and Lloyd’s market participants.
• PRA Rulebook Solvency II Firms Sector — for prudential treatment of contracts run on the platform.
• EIOPA Discussion Paper on Blockchain and Smart Contracts in Insurance (2021; 2023) — which discusses B3i as a leading sector example.
• R3 Corda — the underlying DLT, governed by R3’s licence terms.

B3i held no insurance authorisation; it was an infrastructure provider. The contracts written or reconciled on the platform were issued by its authorised shareholder firms.

How it works in practice

B3i’s principal output was a Property Catastrophe Excess-of-Loss reinsurance platform built on R3 Corda. Its features included:

1. Treaty placement: brokers and reinsurers exchanged terms via shared nodes.
2. Bordereau exchange: cedent and reinsurer ran the same business logic.
3. Loss event processing: catastrophe events triggered state transitions across all parties.
4. Settlement instruction: cash flows were aggregated and reduced to net settlement.

A live Property Cat XL prototype was demonstrated at Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous in 2017 and put into production for several treaties in 2018–2019. B3i also began work on a business interruption product and a clean carbon energy facultative product.

In parallel, B3i developed an SDK and contributed reusable smart-contract templates which were later partially open-sourced.

Common variations / Subsequent developments

• Funding model — B3i’s Series A round in 2018 valued the company in the tens of millions of US dollars. A planned Series B round in 2021–2022 did not close.
• Wind-down — On 22 July 2022, B3i Services AG filed for insolvency in Switzerland. The board cited inability to secure sufficient shareholder commitments and the prolonged sales cycle for consortium technology.
• Asset disposition — Following liquidation, B3i’s codebase was offered for open-source release. Parts of the Cat XL stack were taken up by individual reinsurers and by ACORD’s standards work.
• Legacy — The B3i experiment fed into subsequent narrower deployments at Swiss Re, Munich Re and others, and is referenced in the EIOPA Discussion Paper as the principal European case study.

The B3i wind-down marked a sector inflection point. Since 2022, blockchain in insurance has been driven less by industry-wide consortia and more by bilateral deployments and modular tooling.

Example

A treaty broker placing a £75 million property catastrophe excess-of-loss programme for a UK insurer used B3i’s Cat XL platform in 2019 to share placement slips with five reinsurers simultaneously. Each reinsurer ran identical business logic; reconciliation cycles fell from several weeks to under 48 hours. When B3i Services AG entered liquidation in 2022, the broker and reinsurers reverted to conventional placement; the treaty itself was unaffected because the underlying contract was a standard English-law reinsurance agreement and was held in the parties’ own systems of record.

See also

• Blockchain insurance
• Distributed ledger reinsurance
• Smart contract insurance
• Etherisc
• Reinsurance
• Lloyd’s
• Parametric insurance

References

• EIOPA, Discussion Paper on Blockchain and Smart Contracts in Insurance (2021; follow-up 2023), eiopa.europa.eu.
• B3i Services AG, Property Catastrophe XOL prototype white paper (2018).
• B3i Services AG public statements on liquidation (July 2022) and subsequent reporting in The Insurer, Reinsurance News and Artemis.bm.
• R3, Corda Whitepaper (2016, revised 2019).
• IAIS, Issues Paper on Cyber Risk to the Insurance Sector (2016) and Application Paper on Cyber Risk Underwriting (2020), for cross-cutting infrastructure considerations.
• PRA, SS2/21 on outsourcing and third party risk management.

This entry is part of the Apex Insurance Wiki. Last reviewed by Matt Bartlett on 2026-06-10. Next review: 2026-12-10.

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 724952. Registered in England and Wales, Companies House 07014570. This entry provides general information about UK insurance concepts and is not regulated advice. Consult your insurance broker on your specific position.