The Future of Insurance – Patrick Schmid, President, RiskStream Collaborative

Patrick G. Schmid, PhD is an economist and the President of The Institutes' RiskStream Collaborative—a risk management and insurance blockchain & emerging technology consortium. He works with RiskStream's member-led governance boards and oversees RiskStream's products, relationship management, operations, and technology workstreams. Dr. Schmid offers blockchain and emerging technology thought leadership for The Institutes and coordinates the RiskStream's consortium of insurers, brokers and reinsurers with industry participants and technical partners in developing production applications that can lower costs, improve customer experience and drive efficiency across the insurance industry. Patrick was the 2018 recipient of the International Insurance Society's Leaders of Tomorrow award.

Dr. Schmid formerly served as the head of The Institutes' Enterprise Research department, where he led a teams of data architects and researchers in developing analytical solutions and market insights. He has also served as the Director of Research for the Insurance Research Council (IRC), a division of The Institutes. In this role, he led efforts to study public policy-related insurance issues, published these research efforts in academic journals and testified on these findings in front of regulators. He has a MA and a PhD in economics from Temple University. He has taught economics and finance at several Philadelphia-area colleges and universities (Albright College, Drexel, Saint Joseph's, Temple, Wharton, etc.). Prior to working in the insurance industry, he worked as an economist for Moody's Analytics, monitoring various economic indicators, creating forecasts and blogging on monetary policy.

Highlights from the Show

• RiskStream is part of The Institutes, which most people will know from their CPCU program and Society
• RiskStream is setup as a collaborative, which is central to what it's trying to do around bringing the industry together
  • Multiparty business processes enabled by technology so different organizations can exchange data into their disparate systems efficiently and easily to facilitate smoother transactions
• RiskStream started looking at different use cases that would be applicable, and the first they identified was net settlement in subrogration, and found that a handful of top 10 insurers were already building solutions internally, and one, Liberty Mutual, donated their solution to the collaborative to help move the industry forward
  • This lead to RiskStream's RapidX solution
  • The real value for these solutions really tends to come from the network adoption rather than what any one company gains, so you generally should want broader, easier adoption rather than a single player trying to own it outright
• RiskStream allows for the scaling of the network effect by getting several players together in a way they can feel safe doing because it's a non-profit, non-competitive body
• Bringing together so many carriers also allows RiskStream to take in learnings and needs of a wide range of players so that solutions can be more robust than any one of them might design on their own
• While they've started with a subrogration example, they've also been developing other areas to apply a multiparty solution, including Surety

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance Volume III. The Collaborators, part of the Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.