INSURANCE
“ We can assess risk before an accident happens and prevent it happening in the first place ”
SIMON DICKS INSURANCE CHANNEL MANAGER , LYTX
were uncomfortably high . The US government , through its preoccupation with national security and nuclear threat , funded the development of global positioning system technology – aka GPS . Originally intended for military applications , it eventually did what all major inventions do and , within 10 years , became a tool for civilian applications . This monumental development became the basis for telematic technologies and solutions .
By the early noughties , the internet had passed from nascent into the mainstream , and this meant that experts were able to develop and apply telematics technologies to a wider audience and variety of use cases . Back then , tracking was painfully slow , as data transmission was limited to only a handful of deliveries per hour . But , within a few short years , GPS navigation systems for vehicles were a reality , giving rise to the possibility of using the same technologies to monitor and experiment with road safety and driving data .
Simon Dicks , Insurance Channel Manager , Lytx , explains that , during COVID-19 , many vehicles weren ’ t needed for months , enabling fleets to obtain refunds on those that weren ’ t used . The fallout of this is that today , managers now only expect to have to pay insurance fees for vehicles that are actually on the road – and it ’ s this element that ’ s forcing insurers to provide usage-based cover .
“ Putting a dynamic insurance model into practice isn ’ t that easy . Insurers want to be able to charge a different premium according to the quality of driving ,” says Dicks . “ The only way to address this is to put a highly accurate level of camera technology , both inside and outside cabs , supporting this with AI . This way we can see not just that an incident has happened , but why it happened .”
UBI trends for 2023 As technology and our ability to access and process information in real time becomes commonplace , UBI has hit the accelerator . As Dicks points out , driver and road condition surveillance solutions are a huge gamechanger in the telematics space .
COVID-19 , digital transformation and the rise of UBI While UBI has been in place with auto insurers for several years – and continues to gain in popularity – the boost to the sector only occurred during 2020 and 2021 , when the pandemic transformed the way people worked and commuted . insurtechdigital . com 41