Modernizing property risk data for the insurance industry
The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative ™ is the insurance industry’s largest not-for-profit emerging technology consortium, bringing together carriers, brokers, and reinsurers to solve shared data challenges. Through its member advisory board and working groups, the organization identifies the industry’s most pressing inefficiencies and builds collaborative solutions to address them.
Its latest initiative developed in partnership with Hashgraph is an interoperable property risk and resilience portal built on a hybrid distributed ledger model combining HashSphere private network infrastructure with the public Hedera network. The solution creates a persistent, tokenized identifier for each property, establishing a shared, verifiable source of truth for property risk data across the commercial and residential insurance market.
The Challenge: A fragmented data foundation for a trillion-dollar market
The US property and casualty insurance market underwrites more than $1 trillion in annual premiums – yet the data that underpins it remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to verify. For example, when a broker places a commercial property risk today, they collect COPE data (Construction, Occupancy, Protection, Exposure) and submit it independently to carriers as part of the placement process. Each carrier then verifies existing information and supplements any missing information.
Across a single placement, the same data may pass through five or six different organizations – with no standardized way to confirm that what any one party holds is current, accurate, complete, or consistent with what others have, including data providers. Focusing more on the residential side, growing perils, such as wildfire – particularly acute in catastrophe-prone regions – demand increasingly granular risk data that existing systems are ill-equipped to collect or share.
The result is duplicated effort, inconsistent data quality, data gaps, and underwriting decisions built on a fragmented foundation.
The Solution: A single source of truth, built on hybrid DLT
RiskStream’s property risk and resilience portal addresses this challenge by tokenizing commercial and residential properties and linking each token to a shared, trusted data record. The solution uses a hybrid distributed ledger model: a public token on Hedera serves as a universally accessible and verifiable property identifier, while sensitive COPE and risk data is stored privately on HashSphere – Hashgraph’s private network enterprise offering built on Hedera technology.
This architecture means that anyone can look up and verify a property’s public identifier, while the detailed risk metadata – the kind of data organizations currently pay separately to obtain – is securely managed in a permissioned environment. Brokers, carriers, and data providers contribute to and access a common data layer, rather than each maintaining their own siloed version of the same records.
Real-World Application: Transforming the insurance placement process
Today, placing commercial property insurance begins with a broker collecting COPE data and submitting it to multiple carriers for quotes. Each carrier independently re-verifies the risk, supplements the data with its own sources, and applies its underwriting model. The same information is gathered, checked, and re-gathered across the entire chain.
On the residential property side, growing wildfire and catastrophe exposure demands increasingly granular structural and environmental data – from defensible space to roof classifications – that is collected inconsistently and never shared between carriers operating in the same markets.
The RiskStream portal changes this dynamic. When a commercial or residential property is registered and tokenized, its data becomes a shared reference point that any permissioned participant can access and contribute to.
- Brokers benefit from a streamlined submission process with less redundancy and manual effort.
- Carriers benefit from higher-quality, consistent data that supports more accurate risk assessment and pricing.
As the same property is re-used across future placements, renewals, or claims, the data record grows richer — reducing friction at each subsequent touchpoint.
A trusted neutral party
One of the most distinctive aspects of the RiskStream model is who is behind it. The RiskStream Collaborative operates as a not-for-profit consortium affiliated with The Institutes – the recognized standard in risk management and insurance (RMI) education since 1909. Its members include carriers, brokers, and reinsurers from across the RMI industry. RiskStream member companies form the consortium’s governance network, which includes an advisory board and sector-specific advisory committees, and this network shapes strategic direction and oversees product use and adoption.
This is precisely what makes the solution viable. RiskStream’s neutrality provides a trusted environment in which competing institutions can share and verify data without surrendering their own interests – a challenge that centralized, commercially run platforms cannot credibly solve. Hedera’s governance model upheld by Hedera Council – composed of global enterprises spread across both industry and jurisdiction – reinforces this ethos at the infrastructure level.
Why HashSphere: Infrastructure built for the insurance industry
HashSphere was selected for this initiative because the use case demands both openness and control. A property’s unique identifier must be publicly anchored – accessible to any party in the insurance ecosystem and verifiable without reliance on a single custodian. At the same time, the associated risk data is sensitive, commercially valuable, and cannot be publicly exposed.
HashSphere’s hybrid architecture satisfies critical requirements simultaneously:
- Enterprise-grade performance
- Trusted, transparent governance
- Low, predictable transaction costs
- Seamless interoperability between private and public infrastructure.
As the team behind both the Hedera codebase and HashSphere, Hashgraph ensures both environments evolve together, reducing long-term infrastructure risk for the RiskStream Collaborative and its members.
Impact
RiskStream’s property risk and resilience portal represents a significant step toward modernizing the data infrastructure of the US insurance market. By establishing a tokenized, shared source of truth for property risk data, the solution has the potential to reduce duplicated effort across the placement process, improve underwriting accuracy, and support more accurate pricing – particularly in catastrophe-exposed markets where data quality directly affects insurance affordability.
Following the POC build, the solution will be demonstrated to RiskStream’s working group before moving toward a broader pilot. Looking further ahead, RiskStream plans to extend tokenization to broader capabilities across commercial, residential property, and additional lines of insurance, as the foundational model for a more connected, data-driven industry.
Summary
The RiskStream Collaborative initiative demonstrates how private and public DLT infrastructure can be combined to solve a long-standing data problem in a highly regulated, multi-party industry.
By using HashSphere as the secure private data layer and Hedera’s public network as the trust anchor, the solution gives the entire insurance ecosystem – carriers, brokers, and reinsurers a shared, verifiable foundation for property risk data.
Backed by the credibility of The Institutes and the neutrality of a not-for-profit consortium, this is tokenization applied not as a financial instrument, but as infrastructure for trust.
