A marine blockchain platform developed by EY, technology company Guardtime and industry participants has been adopted for commercial hull insurance after a successful trial.

The Insurwave platform will support more than 500,000 automated ledger transactions and help manage risk for more than 1000 commercial vessels in its first year, EY says.

The project also involves Microsoft, AP Moller-Maersk, Willis Towers Watson, XL Catlin, MS Amlin and data standards group Acord.

AP Moller-Maersk Head of Risk and Insurance Lars Henneberg says the shipping company – the world’s largest – will keep using the platform after being a pilot client, with the technology expected to help alleviate inefficiencies and frictional costs in the way marine insurance is traded.

“We see this platform as a testament to the value that can be extracted from streamlining areas of our industry that still rely on manual and often complex procedures,” he said.

Blockchain allows connection of participants in a secure, private network with an accurate audit trail. It provides “one version of the truth”, which reduces problems when records are held separately and changed independently across multiple parties.

“With this blockchain, we are bringing together, for the first time, all the parties of the insurance value chain on a single platform,” XL Catlin CIO Martin Henley said.

Through the Internet of Things and smart contracts, policies will be updated automatically to reflect risks covered, helping to improve efficiency in claims assessment and payment, he says.

EY, Guardtime and Microsoft plan to extend the technology to other types of business insurance for the marine cargo, logistics, aviation and energy sectors.