Webinar: Scale at last: Getting auto insurance telematics across your entire book of business
Watch our on-demand webinar, Scale at last: getting auto insurance telematics across your entire book of business.
Speakers:
- Louisa Harbage-Edell, Director of Product Marketing and Intelligence, Arity
- Henry Kowal, Director of Director of Product Management, Arity
- Robin Harbage, insurance industry expert
- Bill Harris, Chief Revenue Officer and Event Director, InsureTech Connect
Webinar transcript
Introduction and benefits of telematics for auto insurers
Bill Harris:
Okay, I know we have a lot of content, some wonderful content today, so we’re going to get right to it. Welcome again, my name is Bill Harris. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer and event director for InsureTech Connect 2022. We’re thrilled to have you here with us today for our webinar with Arity entitled Scale at Last: Getting Telematics Across your Entire Book of Business. I’m thrilled to welcome three experts to our webinar. We have Louisa Harbage-Edell and Henry Kowal from Arity, as well as Robin Harbage, noted insurance industry expert. We are going to have some Q&A time throughout the webinar. You’ll see a little button at the bottom, the Q&A button. Please enter any questions that you have for our hosts during the webinar and we get back, we’ll bring those up during the webinar and answer those kind of towards the end. So again, thrilled to have this esteemed group. I’ll let you guys kick it off. Welcome.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Thanks so much, Bill.
Bill Harris:
Absolutely.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
I think at this point we’re all well aware of the value of telematics data, but thus far its reach has really been limited to a subset of insureds who are willing to opt in to share that. So what would it mean to be able to get telematics data for your entire book of business the way we do with credit today? Over the next 30 minutes or so, I’m going to host an informal conversation between our two telematics experts who will share their unique perspective on just that topic. As Bill mentioned, we’ll also take your questions. We’re also going to ask your opinion via a few polls. By the end of our conversation, you’ll have gained some valuable insight into how telematics is poised to solve a slew of pressing problems and how you can take advantage of this data. Now, I’m Louisa the Harbage-Edell and I’m the director of Product Marketing and Intelligence at Arity.
I’ve been working in auto insurance for two decades now. First at Progressive as an actuarial analyst, and then on the consulting side focusing on growth and profitability strategies. I’m joined as Bill mentioned by Henry Kowal, who is a group product manager at Arity, where he’s responsible for emerging aspects of our insurance product strategy, including innovations like Arity IQ. He was previously at The Hartford, where he defined the telematics strategy and the roadmap for their personal he auto business. Our other guest today is Robin Harbage, FCAS. Robin is an auto insurance industry veteran of nearly 40 years. He is worked for both Nationwide and Progressive in executive roles, including chief actuary and head of pricing and product management. He’s also worked as a consultant where he helped dozens of insurance companies around the world launch their telematics programs. In Arity, we jokingly refer to him as the godfather of telematics. As Bill noted, you can type your questions in, although we will save them for the end. And with that, let’s dive in and just get started. Henry, I mentioned that we all sort of see the value in telematics now and hopefully I think everyone who’s joining us is fairly familiar with telematics, but just so we’re all reading from the same playbook, can you set the stage for us? What has really been the promise of telematics to date?
Henry Kowal:
Sure. So Arity’s been at this for about a decade or so now, and based on our expertise and our experience working with our various insurance carrier clients, there’s a few benefits that we see with telematics:
- Better matching of price to risk
- Improved loss ratios
- Improved customer retention
So as we all know, telematics is a highly predictive risk factor and better matches price to risk. So essentially what that means is that better drivers should receive better rates, worse drivers should receive higher rates. And what we tend to see is this notion of self-selection bias. This concept of people who think that they’re a good driver typically sign up for telematics programs like, well, I’m a good driver. I deserve a discount or a benefit and I think I’ll get a discount or benefit. And we see that playing out and as a result, what we see is that better drivers tend to have better loss ratios, and that’s really important from a profitability perspective for an insurance carrier.
And at the end of the day, these are typically the types of clients that insurance carrier wants. They want those good risks, they want those best drivers on their books, the bad drivers, they want them going to their competitor type of thing. The other thing that we also see is improved retention. So better drivers will typically get a better rate in form of a discount, and because of that they’ll typical typically stick around and stay with the carrier. And that’s really important benefit of telematics as well. But then from a consumer perspective, what we see is that consumers want more fair and transparent pricing. And Arity had conducted a survey of about 2,000 respondents and we saw that folks said that they want their insurance rates based on how they actually drive – versus who they are or what their credit score is. Then one final thing I’ll mention in terms of benefits of telematics is that we see mobile telematics shifting from not only just pricing and risk segmentation but also providing more value add features to customers. So an example of that would be like Crash Detection or crash first notice of loss. So really what the carrier is trying to do there is maximize on building a long-term digital relationship with the customer. If the customer already has their mobile app on the phone, what additional features can they provide to keep that customer and make them stickier? So I would say those are some of the benefits that we see from telematics.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a lot of benefits, obviously not just for the insurance carrier but for the customer as well, which I think is really important. Robin, when we talk about especially that the risk correlation, that reminds me about the credit revolution, if you will, in the ’90s, which you obviously lived through. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it parallels telematics?
Parallels between telematics and credit scoring in the ’90s
Robin Harbage:
Absolutely. So a little bit of historical background. Progressive introduced credit back in the ’90s. I was there at the time, in ’96 I was managing New York operations and we introduced a version of credit, sort of a credit light in ’96, and then sort of a full credit model in ’97. Over that time from ’97 through when I came back to corporate in 2000, New York grew more than 35% in total premium year over year at less than an 86 combined ratio. I just think about that for a minute. 35% growth grew from under a hundred million to a half billion book of business in that state alone. And largely on the basis of just having credit information, which was ubiquitous, 90% of insurers we get fine credit on at point of sale. So it was a huge benefit, had great segmentation value, see that sounds familiar, sounds like something else in the marketplace. And yes, roll forward about eight years, 2003, we were playing around with using usage-based insurance telematics and began to roll that out with the Trip Sense device in 2004, fully launched with what they then called Snapshot in 2007. And yes, amazing segmentation power with it. So a lot of similarities are in terms of the value and what can be done.
Challenges in telematics adoption for auto insurers and consumers
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
And then as Henry mentioned, it’s not just the power in terms of risk segmentation, it also has a lot of value to the consumer. So I think the thing we all expected was that this was going to grow a lot faster than it did. We’ve been playing around with it, as you said, even within Progressive for 15 plus years, and it’s hard to get a true number of how many policies enforced use telematics. I know there was an S&P survey in ’21 that said less than 10% I think that’s connected or currently active policies. I think the real number is probably significantly higher than that. Companies like Progressive that don’t actually keep connected policies and drive that number up. And Robin, you may actually have a better sense of what that true number is, but are you surprised at the lack of total policies that are leveraging driving data today or the lack of maybe push that carriers have made when it’s clearly so powerful?
Robin Harbage:
Disappointed, yes, surprise, probably not as much. So insurers are sometimes reluctant to change. It’s interesting because one of the benefits Harry mentioned, Henry mentioned, excuse me, was retention and that’s huge, the power that is just amazing. Insurers are so worried about retention that they oftentimes don’t want to disrupt their book of business, so they’re reluctant to take on new change. In addition to that, telematics, at least in the version that we’ve seen historically, has been expensive to implement and there’s been considerable friction from consumers or the process of onboarding consumers. So those actions, you have to have an insurer download an app. In the old days, they had to plug in a device. So those things were just difficult for consumers. Agents didn’t feel the benefit, so they were reluctant to take on the additional work and to explain it to consumers, those types of things for a trusted agent not be pushing it.
I mean, if I was an insurer and had controlled everything, I would not make it optional. I’d make it mandatory, I’d make it an out, not an opt in, sort of a way to go about it. But that’s not how most insurers would approach this largely because of the difficulties they’ve had with getting people to sign in and what consumers concerned about privacy, the additional time it takes and install a device for an app, and these are not insurancey kind of operations I insurer, unlike us, doesn’t live and breathe insurance every day. They don’t sit there and wake up going, oh man, I need to do something today. Let me put this device in my car. That’s going to be really exciting. So yeah, there’s been a lot of friction. My disappointment is simply that after what insurers saw Progressive due to their books of business with credit, when they saw them coming after them with usage-based insurance, they didn’t learn from their past history and go like, oh my gosh, they’re going to do it again. And they have.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, I think that’s fair. And friction is a great word to describe it, right? It really feels like it’s that friction on the consumer side, on the carrier side that held us back. I mean personally I think the dream has been why don’t we have driving data the way we have credit data, that pool of scores that are just available that we can go out and ping. And so hopefully we get to talk about that a little bit more. But I’m curious what our audience thinks, right? We’ve talked about some of those friction points and I’d love to know what you all think are the struggles. So let’s throw up a poll and get your opinion. Which of the struggles do you think has most inhibited adoption in the industry? Is it the difficulty in getting telematics scores, so not having them readily available, having to get customers to opt in, just that friction with the customers or even though maybe we understand the value of the data, the difficulty of proving that ROI out?
All right, so it looks like the results are in and about 62% of you, the majority of you are saying that the real issue is that customers won’t sign up. So the friction point really seems to be in that customer adoption. And honestly, I don’t think that surprises any of us on the call who’ve lived and breathed this. It really is around getting people to see the value and to buy in. And I can tell you that at Arity, one of the problems we’ve been thinking a lot about really focusing on maybe moving away from this idea of having to go out and get customers at point of insurance sale and instead thinking about meeting customers where they are in their day-to-day lives. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go forward. So I think we’ve taken a little bit more of that longer historic view, but I’d like to build on this by talking more about what’s happening more broadly in the last 18 months that could play a role when it comes to both the use of telematics, but also rates in general. I know personally the last two years have looked a little bit unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And Henry, one of the things at Arity, we’ve obviously been keeping a close eye on thanks to the billions of miles of driving data we collect every week. It’s just the way the driving trends and specifically risk on the road has evolved as a result of the pandemic. Could you speak a little bit to that?
Impact of COVID-19 on driving trends
Henry Kowal:
Yeah, sure. So based on all those billions of of data that you mentioned that we collect, we have a pretty good pulse on what is going on in terms of driving trends, both at a national and at a local level. And so what we saw at the onset of the pandemic, so think back April 2020, driving miles just plummeted. They dropped by about 50% on average now more or less in some geographic areas, but on average about 50%. That’s just unheard of. But it also made sense, right? Because we were all sheltering in place trying to keep away from this nasty COVID virus. But at the same time, while rows were eerily empty, we did see a shift in the riskiness of driving behavior and the most pronounced of that was speeding. So I think there are many hypotheses out there, one of them being that well, roads were empty, people were just had that heavy foot and just really accelerated, so much so that we saw a major increase of people’s speeding at rates well above 80 miles per hour.
But as a consequence, what did we see? We saw crashes increase, we saw the severity of crashes increase as well, because these crashes are happening when people are driving at these really high speeds. And then I think most disturbing is we actually saw a big increase in the number of fatalities. And so fast forward to the end of 2021, and what we saw was that miles driven had actually surpassed pre-pandemic. So it had grown by about 18% over 2019 driving levels. But at the same time we saw that speeding had increased about 10% over 2019 levels. So what we have here is that now there’s more people on the road, more people driving, but more people driving at speed. So that risky behavior continued and unfortunately we saw fatalities continue to increase as well. According to NHTSA, I believe that fatalities had increased for the period of January to September of 2021 by about 12% or more above 2020 and 2020 was already a high fatality time period.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, I think they’ve said we’ve seen two of the most fatal years now in something like a decade, which is just horrifying. And obviously aside from just the human impact of that, there’s going to be insurance impacts to that as well. Well, another obvious recent shift in part due to the pandemic as well as workforce changes and other pieces has been supply chain and inflation costs.
Henry Kowal:
So what we see there is about a 20% rise in claim costs, which is kind of crazy. And the increase in claim costs again is due to the severity, the increase of severity of crashes, as well as the supply chain issues that you mentioned. So essentially parts auto parts are much more expensive because they’re difficult to come by. And then third, because of rising inflation, and that just upswell in terms of overall prices for both materials and for personnel. And so what’s happening is that we’re seeing carriers in order to protect their profitability, they’re starting to raise the insurance rates. So that’s understandable, but think about that from a customer perspective. There’s still a large percentage of folks that are working remotely. Case in point over here, I work from home full time, I look outside my window and I can see my car sitting out there in the driveway. It’s pretty much unused. However, so many other consumers, either they’ve experienced increased insurance rates are ready or they will be experiencing increased insurance rates already. And that from a consumer perspective just doesn’t sit well with folks.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, that’s a really important point. What else do you see that’s impacting the insurance industry right now?
Henry Kowal:
So if all of those things weren’t enough…
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Because that’s not enough…
Regulatory challenges
Henry Kowal:
I really empathize with my friends and colleagues who work in the insurance industry right now and trying to manage all of these things. They’re trying to manage growth, they’re trying to manage customer retention, they’re trying to manage profitability. So on top of all the things we just talked about, there’s also the increased scrutiny from regulators on traditional waiting variables. Credit is one example. So the states of Colorado and Washington have banned the use of credits, and personally I really don’t see those headwinds abating. So if anything, from my perspective, it just kind of underscores the importance of telematics to help insurers try to grapple with the challenges of growing profitability and keeping their customers on their books.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, I mean you mentioned the consumer surveys that we’ve done and the fact that sometimes it’s legislators driving that, sometimes it’s customers pushing for those types of things. So we’re seeing those pressures from a lot of different directions, which is interesting. So that’s obviously a lot of changes and challenges for the industry to be handling over a pretty short period of time. So again, I’m curious how our audience feels. So let’s open up another poll. I’m curious which of these threats and trends you all are most concerned about? Is it the inflation and the rising claim costs? Is it some of these driving trends? We talked about speeding, but we’ve also seen just generally some other more reckless driving as well. Is it credit factor and other scrutiny by regulators? Is it all of the above or is it maybe something we haven’t even identified here? We’ve given you a choice five.
I will say, and we actually have an entire packaged report about the way driving trends have shifted. We did a series of them throughout the first 18 months or so of the pandemic, and I was a little heartened to see that some things did change for the better. Like tailgating got a little less bad, people weren’t slamming on their brakes as much and things like that. So maybe there have been some benefits. But it’s interesting how much driving behavior did change both for good and bad. You don’t think about things like that being so susceptible to outside pressures.
All right, looks like we’re not quite evenly split. Inflation seems to be winning the day, but with about 40% there, but about 31 third of you are saying all of the above. So certainly a lot of pressures that are hitting us. All right. Now, we’ve talked a fair bit about the inflation and the driving trends already. We are actually lucky to have Robin with us to talk about this last one, the credit factors. Robin happens to be a member of the Casualty Actuarial Society Committee on Racial and Social Bias and Ratemaking. And Robin, I understand your committee has either just put forward or is about to put forward some recent recommendations for handling some of this scrutiny around credit. Can you talk about that?
Racial bias in traditional proxies such as credit scores
Robin Harbage:
Absolutely. So the Casualty Actuarial Society has actually prepared four papers. I was fortunate enough to be an author on one of the papers. We released information on those two weeks ago, and then last week I was on a panel talking about two more of the papers. They’ll all be in the public domain sent out with alerts to anybody who’s a member of the Casualty Actuarial Society probably next week in that one of the key things is they talk about four factors that probably have a potential for racial bias in ’em. They’re not identifying, say specifically, they do have, but the possibility is there, there’s a credit, geographic location, home ownership, and driving record. And there’s many reasons. I won’t go into all the details, but I will emphasize that there’s recommendations that racial bias be identified and where it can be identified and no for certainties there asking actuaries to take the lead in trying to eliminate this.
So there is clearly evidence, there is pressure and interest all the way up to the C-suite to try and eliminate variables that or at least de-emphasize variables. And I think that isn’t going to go away. I think one thing we should point out of course is because it’s not been central to rating, usage-based insurance has largely been a variable fit on the residuals of the rating model. After all the other signals been identified by other factors. If you start to say to yourself, well look, let’s use all the signal out of telematics, it becomes an even more powerful tool and deemphasize some of these other variables that really are not the true source of the risk but are just related to or correlated with the risk. So interesting enough, there’s opportunity there as well as there’s probably pressure in the industry from regulators and from consumers to try and emphasize credit and other variables.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
And obviously we did go into this looking variables that had bias. We looked for variables that were predictive, but now that we recognize that they may carry a bias, we’re just trying to do better. So if some of these traditional variables and obviously different ones, if we’re trying to do better, if we’re trying to look for other factors and traditional telematics, maybe one of those. Henry, thoughts about how we can do better?
Henry Kowal:
So we need to use a predictively and variable that is less bias, that is an actual measure of driving risk and not a proxy, and that’s where telematics comes into play.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, I mean that’s fair. All of these other things were ways to assess what driving risk might look like. Telematics is what it actually looks like. So that’s pretty intuitive and it’s something that’s been brewing for a while. Now on the advocacy side, we mentioned that it literally makes sense to consumers when we do consumer surveys, but how does this play into new business rating?
Telematics for more accurate driving risk assessment and premium pricing
Henry Kowal:
Yeah. So traditionally telematics data we talked about is collected. Once a customer kind of enrolls and becomes a policy holder, they will sign up for a telematics program whereby the carrier essentially provides ’em with a participation discount. Generally it’s about 10% really in exchange for their driving behavior data. And then at their customer’s renewal period, the carrier will determine so was this person a good driver? And if so, they’ll get a discount. Conversely, was this customer a bad driver? And we may potentially surcharge them. We don’t see too many carriers surcharging right now in the industry, but some do, and that’s obviously a potential. But as Robin discussed, and I saw some of the comments in the chat and as people kind of alluded to just that customer adoption, getting access to that telematics data is a big challenge, is a big obstacle. And so at Arity we’ve kind of switched the paradigm whereby we’re collecting current customer driving data and we’re able to make that available at time of quote.
So let me just take I guess a couple of minutes to explain how are we doing that? What’s the magic that’s involved here? It’s really not magic, it’s the fact that smartphones are ubiquitous. I’ve lost track on the percentage of how many people have smartphones, but it’s a really big number and I think we know everybody, including my grandmother has a smartphone. And so at Arity what we’re doing is we’re meeting customers or consumers where they’re at. And so what I mean by that is that we’re collecting consumers driving behavior information from the apps that they use every day with their consent of course. And in exchange we’re providing valuable features. An example of that for instance, is Life 360. The Life 360 app is kind of a family security app and we provide the benefit of our Crash Detection feature within that. And again, in exchange for that and with consumers consent, we have access to their driving behavior and their driving data. We have similar relationships with some other mobile publishers including WeatherBug and GasBuddy and My Radar, et cetera. So based on these mobile relationships that we’ve established, we’ve been able to collect tens of millions of driving data. And now with our new product Arity IQ, we’re able to make that driving behavior data available to insurers at point of sale.
Do you want me to share how we do that?
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
I think maybe let’s pause here because it’s a really interesting point and Robin, I’m curious your thoughts because talked a fair bit about that, keeping up with the Joneses – or specifically keeping up with Progressive, what do you think? How does that potentially or access to this kind of data potentially position companies?
Telematics levels the playing field for auto insurers
Robin Harbage:
Yeah, the point that we made earlier about the power of telematics as a scoring device, and as I said, it’s only used on the residual of the models that are being used. The signal is there. It already at that point gives you a 10 times lift for the lowest decile of the highest decile and could be even more powerful than that. That’s just shocking. And Progressive has stated public, I think in 2018 in their press releases that telematics was the most powerful variable they have on their plate to work with. Now think about that. I mean here it is, it’s only used partially, it’s only used by a part of the industry and it’s the most powerful tool out there. It might address some of the bias that’s available in insurance to be tested to be certain, but it certainly is an opportunity there and it’s well accepted.
As you say, Louisa by consumers, they see the value in it. So how do you get it out there? I mean Henry said it quite obviously today as somebody gets a quote, the quote only says, “Hey, here’s what we’ll give you as a discount if you try this” and you have no idea whether it’s going to be valuable to you or not, what if you as a consumer knew right then at the point of sale how much you’d save? How much more powerful would that be? Plus it gives, ensures the opportunity to identify exactly those customers they want to bring on board, which are high retaining customers, high profitable customers. It is game changer to me the idea that at point of sale you then gives somebody a price that is absolutely more related to the risk than what’s ever been available before.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
So it really kind of levels that playing field.
Robin Harbage:
Oh, it does. No question about it. And insurers don’t have the data to do that unless you are an Allstate or Progressive or one of the other early adapters of this, early adopters. And so they’re sitting here saying, I don’t have the data, I can’t do this. So in my view, the future of the industry is having databases like the one you’re developing at Arity quite honestly, that will give any insurer the ability to play in the big leagues with this information.
Henry Kowal:
It’s a great equalizer. So whether you’re a large insurance carrier of mid-sized or a smaller sized tier, it levels the playing field for all carriers.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yeah, it’s a really good way of putting it. And I think Henry, the point you made about shopping rates increasing and price scrutiny from customers, having both fairer and more accurate pricing is going to be so much more important than ever both to avoid costly pricing mistakes as well as to take advantage of that shopping behavior. So I’m conscious of time. We’ve got less than 10 minutes left. I want to make sure we address some of these questions we have in the chat, so don’t we to that and some of those here we’ve got a few about this idea of fair pricing, whether it’s around vehicle data versus driver attention metrics pieces around how Arity is thinking about balancing even within telematics, some of the potential bias and things like that. We know, for example, that people who work third shift may have to drive at night or people who live in, we talked about geographic coming under fire, may have less safe roadways to drive on more potholes and things that they’re dealing with. So Henry, can you talk a little bit about the way Ities score and some of the things specifically prioritized?
Henry Kowal:
Yeah, sure. So we try to balance, right? It’s a balance and we’re not looking to weight one factor more heavily over another one. But having said that, I think there are some that we find are highly predictive, such as hard braking, for instance. But what we’re also looking for is we’re looking for trends or patterns of behavior. So we often hear somebody say like, well, I had to heartbreak otherwise I would’ve run over the cat type of thing and get in an accident. And really we’re not looking for those one-time instances. We’re really looking for those patterns of driving behavior. And so with our drive site two score, we look at things such as time of day, but we’re also considering speeding. We’re also considering a hard braking, but because we’re also focused on smartphone telematics, we’re also considering phone distraction, which I think intuitively we all know is pretty high risk behavior while driving a car. But then we’ve kind of further expanded on that with our new Drivesight algorithm where we’ve added contextual speeding. So we’re actually looking at speeding, not over a certain threshold, but relative to posted speed limit of roadways. And then we’re looking at the types of roadways that folks are driving on as well as their kind of usage patterns. How much and how often do they drive? So we’re kind of looking at it, I’ll say holistically versus focusing on one or two specific variables.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
And I know with Drivesight, our actuarial team felt very strongly about the potential issues around racial bias and they actually got out ahead of this and planned in and they did wait it somewhat to decrease the emphasis on factors. Even though we understand nighttime driving is very predictive, it’s much riskier. You may not be risky, but other people on the road probably are, but we have started to factor in those things and weight things accordingly. So happy to chat further, put you in touch with our actuaries. You can talk more detailed about that. But it is the type of thing we’ve taken under consideration
Robin Harbage:
Point out that there’s actually a obvious benefit to telematics data, and that is around geographic location, which I mentioned before, may have racial bias in it because of segregation and housing that’s evident from decades of red lining and its history. The point that the home body is measured where they drive, not where they’re housed is a really key point to telematics. And so somebody that lives in a suburb and drives into a highly concentrated city area with more dangerous driving will be reflected if that person lives in a more dense neighborhood, but they use public transportation or walk to work or whatever, that will then give them discounts. So there’s a automatic leveling that they will through that factor.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Yep, I think that’s an excellent point. Great. Robin, we have a question here which I think fits right in your niche. Have you seen instances when real-time telematics data has been valuable during claim settlements and some thoughts on the adoption in the industry around that?
Robin Harbage:
I think that the adoption has been slower only because insurers have had a difficult time identifying it and implementing it in their processes. There literally have been situations where the telematics data has been valuable for claims settlement. The one story that’s actually pretty well passed down lowers the gentleman that got pulled into trial on basis of a crime, which was later shown he couldn’t have committed because he had been driving someplace else at the time. But that’s pretty far off the edge there. But yes, I think first notice of loss has tremendous value. It just means that you have to have enough data to be really good at identifying loss and not having error where you identify loss that doesn’t actually occur.
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Excellent. Henry, we have a question here about things like phone distraction. How do we determine that the phone is being used by a passenger versus a driver? I mean, certainly some of this comes back to overall trends and things like that, but do you want to talk a little bit about our passenger driver detection patents and things?
Henry Kowal:
Yeah, for sure. So in order to account for those scenarios, we do have a driver passenger algorithm, which based on a number of different factors determines whether or not the person is actually the driver or if the passenger in our accuracy rate of the algorithm is pretty high. But in the event that it didn’t, I’ll say correctly assign whether the person was the driver or passenger, the user has the ability to actually edit that and change that. So for instance, if they were a passenger but they were assigned as the driver, the user can go in and adjust that and then over time the algorithm learns based on user input and improves.
The benefit of telematics data at scale
Louisa Harbage-Edell:
Excellent. I think one of the things for me too is the fact that we have the opportunity to do this on such a scale has really given our models a chance to learn and grow at exponential rates, right? We’re not talking a one million, two million person insurance insurance program. We’re talking tens of millions of policy, not policy holders, just general consumers. So it’s not that they’ve opted into a program, they are out driving, they do every day, right? We haven’t incentivized them with an insurance discount and we’ve incentivized them with things like how to conserve fuel by a GasBuddy or to Henry’s point crash detection and safety features by a Life 360. So we have billions of miles coming through of actual driving behavior. So we get really just copious amounts of data that we get to play with that we can then match back to actual loss data via our insurance partners.
So just the amount of learning that we get about the way people drive and those types of features and things, not to mention the actual risk and the claims and the actual value of the losses and things that goes with it. It’s just massive. So I know we’re right at time here. There’s a lot of great questions, but I would love to answer. All of us are on LinkedIn and I know we’re sharing a recording of this afterwards. We’ll make sure you have our contact information. We’re very passionate about this. We would love to continue the conversation. I could spend an entire hour telling you about what I think the scope of telematics is in 2030, because personally I think it will have replaced credit and it’ll be like the number one variable. We’ll all be running telematics programs, but I’m really excited to see where it goes as we continue to make it a more ubiquitous variable across the industry.
Bill Harris:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Louisa, Henry and Robin. What a great conversation.