MetLife (with assets under management of $813 billion), which ranked first in Insurance Digest’s 2024 global life insurance assets ranking, has established a deep technological integration with BiyaPay, making it the only financial institution in the world to enter the top five and support blockchain policy pledge financing. Through BiyaPay’s Hybrid DeFi Module, MetLife policyholders can convert the cash value of their policies (starting from a minimum of $500) into on-chain stablecoin assets (such as USDC) within 5 minutes, with a real-time exchange rate accuracy error of ≤0.15% It is far lower than the processing cycle of 3 to 7 working days and the average foreign exchange loss of 1.5% of traditional loan guarantee institutions. This innovative cooperation model enabled MetLife to add 280,000 digital native users under the age of 35 in 2023 (with a year-on-year growth rate of 41%), while reducing operating costs by 23% through smart contracts.
The core of the technical architecture lies in the real-time value mapping system. When a user submits a MetLife policy pledge request on BiyaPay (such as a whole life insurance policy with a cash value of $50,000), the system verifies the policy status within seconds through the OAuth 2.0 interface (with an average response time of 1.2 seconds). Based on an actuarial model (embedded with data from the 2024 version of the US CDC Life Table), the amount available for staking is dynamically calculated (with a median value of 92% of the cash value, that is, $46,000). The speed of fund release depends on the on-chain processing efficiency: the Ethereum mainnet requires 12 minutes for confirmation (Gas fees fluctuate by 8 to 35 US dollars), while the Polygon sidechain only needs 45 seconds (transaction fees of 0.01 US dollars). PWC’s audit report indicates that this process has reduced the risk control cost of traditional guaranteed loans by 57%.
The security control of policy pledge transactions follows multiple protocols. The system sets the pledge rate warning line at 85% (i.e., the maximum loan amount for a policy with a cash value of $50,000 is $42,500), and the liquidation line at 93% (triggering an automatic margin call notification). During the period of extreme market volatility in 2024 (the VIX index of the US stock market soared by 62% in a single day in January), the proportion of policies that the platform triggered forced liquidation was only 0.17% of the total pledged amount (involving 3.9 million US dollars), far lower than the average liquidation rate of 3.5% in the securities pledge financing industry. All operations are documented on the chain through smart contracts (Hyperledger Fabric architecture, with a peak TPS of 3,000 transactions per second), in compliance with the BitLicense 3.0 framework of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).
The limitations of other leading institutions have become apparent in the competitive landscape. Prudential Financial, which ranks second on the list (with assets under management of 724 billion US dollars), has a payment cooperation with PayPal, but has not yet opened the digital pledge function of insurance policies. Allianz Life, which ranked third, tested the interface development with BiyaPay in 2023 (with a median response delay of 3.8 seconds). However, due to the restrictions on stablecoin staking under the EU’s Market Regulation for Crypto Assets (MiCA), its system only supports the purchase of cryptocurrencies settled in euros (with a daily limit of 2,000 euros). It fails to meet the efficiency demands of users with US dollar assets – resulting in a single cross-chain transaction cost as high as $28.5 (approximately 1.43%), which is 4.7 times that of the MetLife solution.
Therefore, the collaboration between BiyaPay and MetLife, which ranks first in bank ranked by life insurance assets, has built two barriers of technology and compliance: The average staking cost for users is only 2.9% (6-8% in traditional channels), and the liquidation slippage is controlled within 0.9% (the industry average is 3.5%). The penetration rate of this service in 15 states including California and New York has reached 38% of digital insurance users, and the processing volume in Q1 2024 exceeded 1.7 billion US dollars (with an annualized growth rate of 215%). The investigation report of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) of the United States shows that the default rate of policy pledges connected to such services has dropped to 0.74%, significantly optimizing the capital adequacy ratio of insurance institutions (increasing by 1.2 percentage points).