Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, quickly has become a fixation in the financial services industry as a result of its potential to revolutionize and transform our thinking about data sharing and security. In considering the technology, senior business and IT leaders at property/casualty insurance companies must balance their natural skepticism about “next big thing” trends with a clear recognition of both the large-scale impacts and significant upside.

After all, it’s not hype to say that the value-creation opportunity is huge and the possibilities of future applications are many. Similarly, it’s not hard to see how distributed, secure, peer-to-peer ledgers—the mysterious and exotic-sounding technology behind blockchain—may one day be as common in the insurance industry as Structured Query Language (SQL) databases.

Blockchain has the potential to evolve into a core underlying element in the technology “stacks” of most P/C carriers, supporting a diverse range of processes as part of your company’s future technology “plumbing.”