REGA ICO Date: 18th October 2017 to 18th November 2017.
REGA Risk Sharing is a decentralized crowdsurance platform based on smart contracts, scoring systems and artificial intelligence technologies. Through the platform everyone can unite in groups to protect each other without involving insurance companies.
REGA Risk Sharing is not an insurance company, but a developer and software as a service provider for REGA platform and crowdsurance products.
BACKGROUND.
We, as consumers, love the shared economy because it gives us real value for the price of goods, provides us with bigger choice and makes our life more convenient. The modern technology has reduced transactional costs making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever — and therefore possible to use on a larger scale. The big change is the availability of more data about people and things which allows physical assets to be disaggregated and consumed as services. But what about financial services like insurance? Why can’t we share our risks with other people and buy a policy not from an insurance company, but peer-to-peer from a particular person or group of people.
The problem here is the risk assessment that by now only insurance companies and banks know how to do. Now the technology is here to make this knowledge available to everyone. There is a lot of data around us. Machine learning is starting to become a commodity and blockchain will allow us to keep funds outside of traditional financial institutions. That’s why the REGA team is leveraging their 20 years’ experience in risk assessment and scoring to create a risk sharing platform - a new standard for the insurance market with state-of-art technology that will be available for everyone as a new segment of the shared economy.
As REGA Platform has fundamental differences with conventional insurance in foundations, rules and philosophy, the founders introduce a new term “Crowdsurance”, meaning people unite in communities to provide a guarantee of compensation for unexpected loss. Compared to traditional insurance, in crowdsurance there are no insurers, intermediaries and brokers, all the processes being controlled and managed by programs and algorithms.
The platform should play a significant role in unlocking the blockchain technology potential for the insurance industry. It will allow people to cover and manage a variety of risks without an excessive and inefficient chain of intermediaries. Peers may finally get the opportunity to manage their own risks at their own price without intermediary risk carriers receiving all upside of risk premiums. The platform just takes a flat fee for providing the technological solution to the market, peers receive all the benefits and prolonged risk coverage.
This new approach will finally lead to a social role of insurance and provide a solution for the old conflict of interest between insurance profit gains and claims adjustments. Crowdsurance will finally become a community development driver rather than a source of profit from unrealized risk for insurance companies. Getting rid of intermediaries will make insurance more cheap and affordable. The insured person will become part of the community, which should play a significant role in his life and expose moral hazard phenomena to reduce risk on the platform. Peers get additional benefits by sharing risk coverage with those who cannot afford to get insurance products creating reputation based social networks.
HOW IT WORKS.
The REGA Risk Sharing Platform (Platform) is an open source software system that will be available as SaaS for developers and for crowdsurance product creators. The platform consists of two main parts: off-chain and blockchain.
The off-chain part is the redesigned scoring and underwriting iNSTANTLOAN system that includes products and client databases, product matching engine and scoring/risk management module. In blockchain there are several smart contract types: three level cascade pool structure including super pool, tokens and smart contract factory.
Here is the platform process of a pet crowdsurance product that is running on the REGA Platform prototype:
- Use the messenger identification process for KYC (Telegram, Skype, Facebook), start chat with Lexi Club Bot (Bot). Lexi Club is the first crowdsurance product by REGA created for pet owners to defend them from financial losses due to pet trauma or illness.
- User sends to the Bot own photo and pet photo.
- The Bot is using MS Cognitive Service to identify pet type (cat or dog) and process pet photo using own pet recognition algorithm to check if the pet is already in database (existing pet/member).
- Score pet /user, calculate member contribution amount.
- User links his fiat e-wallet to the profile and issues permission to withdraw calculated amount in the fiat currency.
- The Bot finds another person who would like to exchange Ether to fiat currency and make P2P exchange transaction. Sends Ether to the member smart contract and issues Lexi Card.
- Member reports the case. The Bot checks if Lexi Card is active (active date = issuing date + 5 days).
- If card is active the member can use Bot to make an appointment or get advice from vet on-line.
- The member has visited clinic. Pays for the service and sends pet photo from clinic with geographic location. Also the member sends bill and epicrisis to the bot and proves payment.
- The Bot checks provided documents and approves payment and if the reimbursement amount is less than 50$ approves the payback. If amount is more than 50$, calls expert voting procedures.
- The Bot makes up to 80% of the vet bill reimbursement to the member from Pool. A person who would like to buy Ether (can be new user) is found and P2P exchange transaction is committed. The fiat reimbursement amount will go to the member linked e-wallet.
BLOCKCHAIN LEVERAGES.
- REGA implements risk-sharing smart contracts on the Ethereum Platform.
- Acceptance of new users via scoring process managed by smart contract.
- Payment requests are confirmed by smart contract or via expert voting.
- All transactions and payments are in public blockchain. By helping to transfer value transparently and securely, Blockchain eliminates the need for trust to third parties
USE CASES.
Members.
The platform helps members with a user friendly interface to overlook all attributes of the risk coverage product. Risk Constructor will enable Customers to choose suitable parameters for risk coverage in a fun manner, while immediately calculating the member contribution, making the process easy and transparent. Helpful Dashboard enables to see contributions collected, amount of risk covered, dates of inception and expiration of the smart contract, types of risks within the smart contract. Social Network Bot will also remind member about approaching expiring date of smart contract.
Each member will get a unique identification number - the member ID that will link all electronic documents to the particular person. REGA will store all applications that member has submitted with scoring results, product offers and smart contracts addresses. All information about submitted requests and payments will be linked to the member and this information will be used for scoring model adjustments. The member history will play an important part during the risk assessment and give REGA a tool to calculate individual price for each person.
Partners.
REGA Risk Sharing will provide Partners with Open API to connect to the platform and get access to Customers. Personal blockchain accounts and transactional records will be created to monitor overall activity. Super Pool structure, created to cover substantial risks involved within the products, will give additional confidence of credibility of the platform to third parties. Compliance of business processes with legal environment in different jurisdiction is univocal for REGA Risk Sharing platform.
RST USES.
- The REGA Tokens will be accepted as payment for crowdsurance products running on the platform.
- RST is used as a REGA expert license. RST holders help to resolve cases and improve risk management models. Such work will bring to the token holders additional income in proportion of purchased number of tokens, because part of crowdsurance contributions collected on the platform will be allocated as expert’s fee payments.
- Can be utilized as member contribution fees in crowdsurance pools.
ROADMAP.
HOW ADVANCED IS IT?
The REGA Risk Sharing Platform prototype is already up and running and is being used for created products including Lexi Club mutual Pet health crowdsurance and REGA gadget protection.
The platform is essentially the next step for the development of INSTANTLOAN scoring and underwriting system that will be redesigned to incorporate blockchain layer and will be available as an open source software and service to the fintech community.
INSTANTLOAN was developed back in 2001 for the first Russian mortgage bank DeltaCredit: INSTANTLOAN platform was born at that time and for more than 15 years it is the core business for Bellwood Systems, parent company of REGA Risk Sharing project. During those years more than 10mln were invested in the system by corporate clients, including DeltaCredit, VTB, Svyaznoy and Sberbank, the largest retail bank in Russia (#56 Forbes), which is currently using iNSTANTLOAN for selling insurance products in more than 10,000 branches around the country.
In 2014 the INSTANTLOAN cloud service was introduced and now clients can use the system for consumer loans and insurance originations. Each month iNSTANTLOAN is processing more than $25mln transactions from several retail clients including MediaMarkt (Metro group).
The project is supported by Microsoft, granting the team with free to use professional services like Azure Bot Service, Azure Storage, Cognitive Service and Machine Learning.
SIMILAR PROJECTS.
InsureX.
Based in London, InsureX’s goal is to create a new, alternative insurance marketplace that disrupts the current inefficiency system in the insurance industry.
The InsureX platform uses blockchain technology to streamline the process between buyers and sellers of insurance products. The platform also allows managing the downstream processes related to programs, policies, premiums and claims.
Target users of InsureX’s platform include reinsurers, insurers, brokers, and general companies.
HOW IS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PROJECTS IN THE SPACE?
Their model doesn’t include insurance companies as agents, since it allows people protect themselves as a community without 3rd parties (Crowdsurance).
USER REVIEWS.
[REGA Risk Sharing is creating a technology to separate risks among peers with designated pools structure. Super pool facility provides additional financial coverage for all the pools.]
[The lack of participation of insurance companies in the process may facilitate and simplify it, so it’s rather attractive project. ]
[What are the benefits to buyers of tokens REGA?]
[The Tokens are based on Bancor protocol and have reserves in ETH, as the crowdsurance premiums will inflow the reserves will rise and asynchronously rise the price that can be considered price floor, the price on the exchanges will be higher on the expactations of increasing premiums. REGA Tokens are Expert licences and give voting rights.]
[What kind of insurance? Life insurance, vehicle insurance???]
[REGA started from pet protection, where you can cover up to 80% of the vet bill. Next, different crowdsurance products will be developed, mich cheaper then conventional insurance.]
[On what basis you will be able to develop insurance products that will be more economical than the competition?]
[The value created here is that reserves created to cover risks belong to the community and the unrealized risk is not the source of profit]
[How do you assemble a list of experts to advise users REGA on certain issues?]
[The token holders enter the platform, go through KYC and expert procedure and become experts.]
[If your platform is already in test mode? If Yes, how can we access the demo?]
[The first product on the platform Lexiclub is already running]
[You will use IoT technology? For what purposes are they used for?]
[IOT devices can be used as oracles for seeding trusted data feed into the smart-contracts]
[As users will be able to REGA drones to monitor the condition of the property and fixing insurance claims?]
[That is a probable solution, yeah. Drone network is expanding and may be used for different cases such as inspections.]
[I wish they were able to provide full service just from the start, but I understand it all depends on the users, amount of money raised and time to develop the platform. First, they will focus on animal insurance, it’s a rather small service, but it turns out there are a lot of expenses that pet owners have. The idea of crowdfunding an insurance is also pretty interesting and can be the decentralized future, where we don’t need big banks or insurance companies dictating to us rules. We can easily vouch and pay for each other.]
[Due to which circumstances do the owners of the insurance product Lexi Club pay 80% less for veterinary services?]
[For a regular fee of ~5$ you get up to 80% compensation of your vet services costs in case your pet get sick or injured. They get up to 80% compensation, so if your vet bill is 100 dollars, you get up to 80 dollars in return.]
[Would you consider extending the ICO in case you did not reach the soft cap during the next 11 days? Maybe more people will invest after the fork, are you optimistic about surpassing the soft cap?]
