The New York-based life insurance firm, MetLife is hoping to improve the life insurance claims process by utiling the Ethereum blockchain. MetLife’s Singapore-based incubator, LumenLab is teaming up with Singapore Press Holdings and NTUC Income in order to help launch a smart contract platform built on Ethereum Lifechain. Prior to this, MetLife used blockchain tech and public ledger for a mobile app called Vitana, which was supported by Ethereum to pay out claims to pregnant women who have contracted gestational diabetes. The main smart contract platform being used in Lifechain will be in a very similar light to what happened when Vitana first piloted. The CIO MetLife Asia and CEO of LumenLab, Zia Zaman recently spoke in an interview with Forbes where he said: “The future of distributed ledger technology in life insurance will somewhat depend on public sector involvement. Those jurisdictions and governments that are more innovative will see citizens and policyholders in their jurisdictions benefit from less friction, more fulfilled payments, and a general overall improved experience.” Life insurance is, of course, a very private matter and in some cases can leave family members questioning whether the deceased was insured or not. This innovation could also lower prices and develop new services around tokenisation. When families lose a member, Lifechain will ‘programmatically’ determine if a person was protected by a policy and will automatically file a claim, eliminating the several steps involved in the process. “A death certificate will be issued by a government database, following which the system retrieves the deceased person’s National Registration Identity Card. This is further encrypted onto the Ethereum blockchain and this triggers queries on NTUC Income’s database looking for a matching policy.” So after a match is found, Singapore Press Holdings will inform members of the deceased and release a obituary, while the NTUC income initiates the life insurance claim process. Zaman has also spoken on Facebook’s latest announcement of its upcoming Libra coin. The CEO said: “We have no plans on doing that, nor have we thought about it for our existing use cases. That doesn’t preclude it from the future of course, but for now we have not thought about it.”