How Cork Modernizes Insurance

Insurance is one of the largest industries in the world and one of the least modernized. Every carrier, broker, MGA, and reinsurer has spent decades digitizing its own operations, but almost nothing has been built to connect them to each other.

A single policy is written by an MGA, placed by a broker, carried by an insurer, and ceded to a reinsurer. At each step, the party receiving it keeps its own separate record of the same facts. Those records live as siloed and redundant spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, statements.

That produces three distinct costs:

1. There's unnecessary labor for every company in the chain whose job is to re-key and verify documents someone else already produced correctly.
2. Then there’s different kinds of delays that come from outdated processes. There’s the delay of information moving slowly in batch CSV files. Then there's a delay in premiums that can spend months in transit in traditional payment rails.
3. And finally, there's the challenge of reconciling who owns each risk at any point in time. This creates a need for cushions of idle capital because no party can see (or price) the current state of risk clearly so they resort to pre-emptive strategies.

All of this is simply the structural byproduct of an industry that has grown by adding participants and contracts for three centuries without ever building the shared infrastructure between them. Today we have new settlement and record-sharing technology that gives the industry a real opportunity to close this gap between its participants.

Cork provides a shared digital infrastructure to tackle each of these fundamental challenges in three ways:

Shared Recordkeeping

The first solution lays the groundwork for the rest: a single, shared database to eliminate all the redundancy and extra costs associated with fragmented data visibility.

No party to a risk has a shared, current view of the policy or program they all hold a piece of. A carrier's record, an MGA's record, a broker's record, and a reinsurer's record can each be accurate on their own terms and still disagree with each other, because nothing keeps them in sync. Information arrives late and gets duplicated across systems. This is also seen as a disconnect between reconciliation of claims data and the underlying payments because they are operating on two separate timelines. Anyone who has played telephone knows what all of this leads to.

Let’s put this in concrete terms by looking at what the NAIC Standard Form Trust Agreement says. This framework sets the terms most collateral trusts run on and fixes the floor for collateral statements as annual and quarterly as the cap. In practice, that usually means a carrier can be contractually entitled to exactly one look a year at the collateral backing its ceded book, with everything in between taken on faith.

This inefficiency in recordkeeping can have costly consequences. In one public case, a specialty carrier's program collateral was entirely genuine but it was drained against a growing obligation in between statements. By the time anyone looked again, that single incident produced a CAD 81.5 million write-down simply because nobody had a current enough view to see what was going on.

Cork's fix is a neutral shared layer where one verified record of policies, exposures, premium, claims, and collateral is readable by every party to a risk and owned by none of them. It runs alongside the systems each party already has rather than replacing them, so nobody has to rip out what already works for them.

Swift Payments Reconciliation

A shared database also creates room for efficiencies in how money itself gets transferred between each carrier, broker, MGA, and reinsurer.

Settling premium and claims today takes months because everything moving between counterparties gets matched by hand, checked, and checked again as it passes down the chain. Besides the hours spent on reconciliation, this capital ends up spending too much time either in transit, waiting to reach the party it's actually owed to, or held as a larger cushion than the risk requires because nobody can do verification in a timely manner.

In contrast, today’s stablecoin payment systems are able to transfer money programmatically across the globe at a speed and cost that were impossible on traditional rails. This is why every financial institution is starting to look at stablecoins for payments and insurance should be, too. Stablecoins eliminate the need for these redundant verification processes since they exist as a shared, transparent record of every transaction. This lets payments come in without any of the costly delays.

For example, on a $100 million book, having premium arrive three months sooner would be worth roughly $126,000 a year, every year, on every issuance, because it applies whether or not there's ever a loss. Over a three-year program, that's close to $378,000. Compare that to the current case where we basically have trapped collateral. By the time that $100 million is released it is worth closer to $70,000.

Cork's fix is a modernized payments and capital-efficiency layer built on top of the shared record. This allows premium and claims to settle programmatically, in minutes, using stablecoin rails instead of a chain of manual handoffs. At the same time, cash reserves can be allocated into yield-bearing positions while they’re held and collateral releases as soon as the facts support it, reducing the cushion each party holds against what it cannot see.

Capital Formation

Perhaps the largest opportunity Cork creates exists further down the line. Cork allows each risk, and each slice of that risk, to be represented as a token. Those tokens can then be priced and traded at the most granular level, opening new opportunities for capital formation.

Insurance offers attractive yields but capital can only buy the risk it can price, and pricing a risk means knowing its current state. Today, that state is split across five separate records and arrives months late, so every deal requires bespoke diligence, products are hard to assemble at scale, and distribution stays narrow even where demand doesn't.

The market this locks out isn't small. Private ILS and catastrophe bonds together make up a market north of $140 billion, and the drag from trapped capital on that market is north of 200 basis points a year in higher-frequency structures, according to the actuarial modeling that exists on this. That translates to higher premiums and having everybody involved pay more only because the infrastructure to price and trade risk more precisely doesn't exist yet.

Cork's shared and fast recordkeeping makes risk pricing possible on its actual state rather than a stale approximation of it. This allows risk to be priced accurately, structured, and distributed the way any other financial asset is, leading to the creation of new products based on different pools of insurance risk. For carriers and reinsurers, that's a new distribution channel for a regulated product they already underwrite. For investors, it's access to an asset class that today is effectively closed to anyone not already inside it.

Why Now?

Insurance is an industry that’s ripe for meaningful modernization beyond individual file digitization. Especially as a data-dependent industry, it could reap its own benefits from new advances in AI that would require information to be more readily available, legible, and actionable. To get there, it needs an insurance stack that is up to speed with how insurance companies run while creating a digitally unified system.

The infrastructure to actually build this has reached a turning point in its maturity. Stablecoins have gone from a niche crypto product to ordinary financial plumbing, having risen consistently to over $300B today. Asset tokenization has become one of the largest sectors in the industry with over $2 billion in real-world assets expected to come onchain by 2030 according to conservative estimates.

Tokenized reinsurance, specifically, has also become a reality. Schroders Capital and Hannover Re closed a live tokenized collateralized reinsurance deal in April 2026 with collateral funded in stablecoin, invested in a money market fund. Its cash flows and controls were governed by contract logic written directly into the reinsurance agreement. There are also tokenized reinsurance products like OnRe and re.xyz that are seeing broader circulation in RWA markets.

Insurance is ripe for modernization right now, and the industry knows it. AI takes up most of the conversation, and for good reason. Insurance is a data-heavy industry built on manual, repetitive processes. Carriers are, rightly, looking at tools that can automate underwriting, claims handling, and reconciliation. But these tools are only as good as the information they run on, and today that information is scattered across CSV files, PDFs, email threads, and checks, each held at separate entities. A fully digitized insurance stack has to connect the record of payment to the payment rails, not just automate individual paperwork processes.

That is the system Cork is building: a shared, neutral record that every party to a risk can read, paired with payment rails that let premium, claims, and collateral move. For an industry that has long been fragmented, Cork provides the foundation to modernize the way insurance actually runs and to enable other tech like AI to work best on data that is finally in one place.