Monday, September 24, 2012

Big data and telematics insurance challenge

In my research on the development of the telematics and the insurance industry  I have realised that my slide and previous post on the maturity of the aggregators needs to change. This is caused by the addition of data..... Big data!

As premiums get more specific to the individual driving behaviour and more data is collected on each policy holder, there are questions that I've got:
  1. If I want to have access to all the data about my driving behaviour, can I?
  2. How much data is this and how do I get it & store it?
  3. How do I provide this data to another potential insurer to be able to compare their premium?
  4. How would I then provide it to several insurers at the same time as part of an aggregate service and are they able to produce comparable policies?
So far there doesn't seem to be any easy way of taking one set of telematics driving data and moving it across to another company. Surely this will become of more and more concern to drivers and also to the people that set legal policy & regulations? So if the Data Commissioner's office and even the financial service regulation bodies are not taking an obvious interest, you can be pretty sure they will do soon.

In the end, telematics does not become an issue about creating a comparable policy from insurer to insurer, it is about the bigger issue of how user data is collected, where and who stores it, who has access to it (with and without the insurers permission) and what eventual use this is put to.

No comments: