The Perceived Effectiveness of Blockchain for Digital Operational Risk Resilience in the European Union Insurance Market Sector

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

- There is no related work section that refers to other works and frameworks in other application domains.
- They should describe (even briefly) why they used one kind of questionnaire over others, in fact in section 5.1 they state that they use "with some modifications a framework suggested by Mousmounti (2014a)", but they do not justify their choice and the reason why they preferred this framework over others.
- The document is too long (15 pages), the tables and pictures seem too big, it would be better to reduce the spacing.
- There are many errors related to missing spacing between words, some brackets are missing, punctuation is wrong in many sentences where, for example, instead of a colon they put a semicolon before a list.
- There is a lack of attention when correcting the text, it seems that it has not been proofread enough.
- The bibliography is not easy to consult as neither the bibliographic sources nor the references within the text are numbered.

Author Response

Thank you for the comments and suggestions which had been addressed and track changed in the revised document. These suggestions have helped to make our article much more comprehensive, flowing and clear.

For ease of the review, we have again rewritten all comments and suggestions by the reviewer and put our answers below them. We have also made track changes to the manuscript which we uploaded as per template in word format version 6 and uploaded a clean version as pdf for ease of the reader.

R- There is no related work section that refers to other works and frameworks in other application domains.

A -DORA is a new European proposal and therefore as far as we can understand not much in terms of academic literature is available and so far we have not managed to find any literature relating Blockchain to DORA. This in itself shows a gap in the literature and the novelty and scientific contribution of a model for testing the effectiveness of an IT system for addressing digital operational resilience.

R - They should describe (even briefly) why they used one kind of questionnaire over others, in fact in section 5.1 they state that they use "with some modifications a framework suggested by Mousmounti (2014a)", but they do not justify their choice and the reason why they preferred this framework over others.

A-We have added a paragraph in lines 203-209 to justify the use of a survey the suitable method

R- The document is too long (15 pages), the tables and pictures seem too big, it would be better to reduce the spacing.

A-As far as we are aware the Journal does not specify a max length or word count and the tables and figures are in the format required by the journal. Moreover, as far as we can understand 7594 words which include tables, figures, references, title, affiliations, authors and other details required by the journal as per the template provided is within the word limit suggested by most journals.

R- There are many errors related to missing spacing between words, some brackets are missing, punctuation is wrong in many sentences where, for example, instead of a colon they put a semicolon before a list. - There is a lack of attention when correcting the text, it seems that it has not been proofread enough.

A-Most of the issue was a formatting problem when changing the font to that required by MDPI, unfortunately, some words got linked together and we had not noticed. However a grammar, formatting and spelling check of all the documents was carried out by the correspondent author who is a native English speaker and all typos, formatting and grammar mistakes were corrected.

R- The bibliography is not easy to consult as neither the bibliographic sources nor the references within the text are numbered.

A-The Bibliography sources and the references are drawn up as per journal requirements

Thank you again

Prof. Simon Grima

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the authors for handling the issues by the reviewers and revising the manuscript accordingly.

Author Response

We thank you for the kind comments and appreciate all the suggestions made. This has made our paper much better flowing and stronger. Thank you much appreciated.

Prof Simon Grima

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper entitled "The Perceived Effectiveness of Blockchain for Digital Operational Risk Resilience in the European Union Insurance Market Sector" aims to use the case of Blockchain to evaluate whether, the 5 characteristics determined from literature required for effective digital risk resilience; specifically, integration, flexibility, reliability, relevance and timeliness, have an impact on the effectiveness in addressing the requirements of the proposed European Union’s digital operational resilience Act (DORA).

The study is interesting and well writen in the current form. Thus, I recomment the publication of the paper. As a minor addition, I recommend authors to write some lines about Bitcoin, after the first paragraph of the literature review, given that it is one of the most known application of Bitcoin. A footnote could be enough.

In terms of the paper, and in line with this paragraph, authors could cite the survey that review the Bitcoin literature

Corbet, S., Lucey, B., Urquhart, A., & Yarovaya, L. (2019). Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis. International Review of Financial Analysis, 62, 182-199.

and the paper

Vidal-Tomás, D., & Ibañez, A. (2018). Semi-strong efficiency of Bitcoin. Finance Research Letters, 27, 259-265.

in which the independence of Bitcoin with central authorities is demonstrated from the economic perspective.

Author Response

Thank you for the comments and suggestions which have been addressed and track changed in the revised document. These suggestions have helped to make our article much more comprehensive, flowing and clear.

For ease of the review, we have rewritten all comments and suggestions by the reviewers and put our answers below them. We have also made track changes to the manuscript which we uploaded as per template in word format version 6 and uploaded a clean version as pdf for ease of the reader.

R- The paper entitled "The Perceived Effectiveness of Blockchain for Digital Operational Risk Resilience in the European Union Insurance Market Sector" aims to use the case of Blockchain to evaluate whether, the 5 characteristics determined from literature required for effective digital risk resilience; specifically, integration, flexibility, reliability, relevance and timeliness, have an impact on the effectiveness in addressing the requirements of the proposed European Union’s digital operational resilience Act (DORA).

The study is interesting and well written in its current form. Thus, I recommend the publication of the paper.

A -Thank you

R- As a minor addition, I recommend authors to write some lines about Bitcoin, after the first paragraph of the literature review, given that it is one of the most known applications of Bitcoin. A footnote could be enough.

• Agreed and done vide track changes – 2nd paragraph as requested

R -In terms of the paper, and in line with this paragraph, authors could cite the survey that reviews the Bitcoin literature

Corbet, S., Lucey, B., Urquhart, A., & Yarovaya, L. (2019). Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis. International Review of Financial Analysis, 62, 182-199.

and the paper

Vidal-Tomás, D., & Ibañez, A. (2018). Semi-strong efficiency of Bitcoin. Finance Research Letters, 27, 259-265.

in which the independence of Bitcoin with central authorities is demonstrated from the economic perspective.

A -Agreed and done as suggested vide track changes in reference section and paragraph 2

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

In the chapter "2. Literature Review", the authors could cite a paper on the use of blockchain for certifying the authenticity, ownership and timestamping of any document (thus also in the insurance field).
Francesca Fallucchi, Marco Gerardi, Michele Petito, Ernesto William De Luca: Blockchain Framework in Digital Government for the Certification of Authenticity, Timestamping and Data Property. HICSS 2021: 1-10

Author Response

Agreed and added (Track Changed line 100 to 103). Thank you for this suggestion which has made our paper and article much better.

Thanks

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors investigated perceived effectiveness of Blockchain via a survey study.

Though their research is original and the methodology is statistically sound, the manuscript contains many typos that hinders effective communication of the contents. I strongly encourage the authors to thoroughly review the manuscript and correct all the typos. Some (but not exhaustive) lists of typos are given below:

Line 72: 4 Blockchain incentivizes -> 4)  Blockchain incentivizes
Line 111: sug-gestBlockchain -> sug-gest Blockchain
Line 112: useBlockchain ->use Blockchain
Line 113: effectivenessmodel -> effectiveness model
Line 114: were we aim to -> it seems that this sentence is fragmented.
Line 136: Blockchainvis-a-vis -> Blockchain vis-a-vis
Line 230: 177 – 34.5%? -> is this 17.7-34.5%?
Line 290: Table 7Standardized -> Table 7 Standardized 

Reviewer 2 Report

Unfortunately, the main term of your research 'blockchain' is not defined. There are not only several definitions, there exist different approaches and perceptions. The term is often used without a clear idea in the public. Therefore, is a survey the suitable method? I miss the justification for the used method.

Following the paper my impression is that everything can be solved with blockchain technology. This is probably not true. Unfortunately. I miss how this technology can be used. Without a definition of the term and vague formulated statements the participants of the survey can always mark that they agree with the statement.

Where did you collect data? Did you collect data globally? Citizenship? Nationality? 

'exponential growth': There is neither a proof of an exponential growth, nor suitable references.

Many typos.

Reviewer 3 Report

The novelty and scientific contribution of this paper do not appear to be significant enough for further consideration by the journal. The main critical issues are:

- There is no related work section that refers to other works and frameworks in other application domains.
- They should describe (even briefly) why they used one kind of questionnaire over others, in fact in section 5.1 they state that they use "with some modifications a framework suggested by Mousmounti (2014a)", but they do not justify their choice and the reason why they preferred this framework over others.
- The document is too long (15 pages), the tables and pictures seem too big, it would be better to reduce the spacing.
- There are many errors related to missing spacing between words, some brackets are missing, punctuation is wrong in many sentences where, for example, instead of a colon they put a semicolon before a list.
- There is a lack of attention when correcting the text, it seems that it has not been proofread enough.
- The bibliography is not easy to consult as neither the bibliographic sources nor the references within the text are numbered.