How Could Blockchain Technology Benefit an Insurance Company?

I work for a large Insurance Company and I am fascinated with blockchain technology.

I stumbled on this news release from John Hancock a few days ago (the story is actually from April but I just learned about it recently):

http://www.johnhancock.com/about/news_details.php?fn=apr2016-text&yr=2016

Basically, John Handcock (Manulife Financial) has a think-tank / RD lab called Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT). They announced they are partnering with a company called ConsenSys and BlockApps to develop some kind of Ethereum blockchain proof of concept. The release says "We could not have found a better partner than ConsenSys and BlockApps to accelerate our understanding and ability to build out applications leveraging blockchain."

Unfortunately, they are extremely sketchy on any details. I would love to figure out what they're working on. I am racking my brain trying to figure out how this technology might be used in an Insurance business.

My company is very conservative so pitching an idea like this would probably be crazy, on the other hand if there's a real opportunity here (i.e. $$$) then money talks.

In my company, we have a lot of cash and low risk securities in reserve. We collect premiums. We pay out dividends, lump sums and annuities. Most of our transactions are through wire transfer and ACH. We move money around internally using Microsoft Excel and email :). It would be really cool to say we could use cryptocurrency to facilitate these transactions but honestly I'm not seeing a business case for it. What we do now is efficient-enough and it works. I'm sure there's more to it that I'm missing.

I know there's a lot of big brains on here and blockchain experts, would love to hear anyone's ideas or opinions on this.