#3 | June 2019 | Global Edition | thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow
The Future of Risk: How Behavioural Monitoring Can Positively Impact The Future of Insurance ++ PLUS Collaborating for a Safe, Autonomous Future riving to True Partnership D in UBI: The Floow and CSAA in Conversation Spotlight On… Our Pricing and Actuarial Team Lookback at Our Time at BIBA and Dig-In in May
Photo by Utsav Shah on Unsplash
WELCOME 2
Welcome to Driven, The Floow’s quarterly business updates publication.
In this edition 4 - 5 Letter from our CEO: Aldo Monteforte 6 - 13
he Future of Risk: How Behavioural T Monitoring Can Positively Impact The Future of Insurance written by David James and Dr Lisa Dorn
14 - 17 Collaborating for a Safe, Autonomous Future written by Dr Sam Chapman 18 - 23 Driving to True Partnership in UBI: The Floow and CSAA in Conversation at the Dig-In Conference in Austin, Texas 24 - 27
Spotlight On… Our Pricing and Actuarial Team written by Lucy Eruero
28 - 29 May Event Summary - BIBA and Dig-In written by Charlotte Pearson
We are The Floow, a leading telematics service provider delivering solutions to insurance companies, auto manufacturers and fleet operators worldwide. Our capabilities comprise of excellence in data science, cutting-edge technology and the innovative use of social science to provide unique safety insights to the benefit of our partners and their policyholders. We were founded in 2012 by CEO Aldo Monteforte with the mission to make mobility safer and smarter for everyone, a mission which still drives everything we do today. Over the last two years, we have seen significant growth with our team now reaching 110 people,
CEO Aldo Monteforte & CIO Dr Sam Chapman
opened our first office outside the UK in Detroit and moved to a product focus and an agile way of working in order to ensure we are ready and able to meet the changing needs of our clients and their customers wherever they are based. With Driven, we want to showcase not only our new products and the industry events that we will be attending but to use this as a platform to demonstrate our innovative nature and forward thinking in the areas of insurance, mobility and road safety. This is why we will be focusing heavily on how we see the future of mobility
The Floow Ltd,
unfolding, what we are working on to ensure we
The Floow Campus, Wicker Lane,
are ahead of the curve and how we are working
Sheffield, S3 8HQ
with our clients to make sure that they are ready for the challenges this fast-changing market will
+44 (0) 114 270 1114
bring.
info@thefloow.com
The future of mobility and insurance is uncertain
www.thefloow.com
but extremely important, make sure you’re one step ahead with Driven.
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Aldo Monteforte, CEO, The Floow
etter from our CEO: L Aldo Monteforte Welcome to the third issue of Driven, our quarterly magazine which explores the application of telematics to safer and smarter mobility. In this issue we investigate the spectrum of vendor-carrier partnerships, why they are critical to the success of UBI programmes and how, through partnerships, insurers lay the foundations for fruitful, long-term engagement with their customers. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. When we founded The Floow back in 2012, we did so with a mission to dent the inefficiencies of mobility, where the cost to society is measured in lost lives and limbs. Well over a million people are killed on the roads around the world every single year. Risk mitigation is an enormous task, one that technology alone cannot solve without deep collaboration involving technologists, insurers, drivers, legislators, researchers, service providers and auto manufacturers. We’re proud to play a part at both levels, building great tech and engineering deep collaboration with our carrier partners.
vision to make insurance more engaging and rewarding for CSAA customers. Another example of deep collaboration is MOVE_ UK, a UK government funded research initiative we’ve been a key partner in for the past 3 years. Working alongside Direct Line Group, Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch, TRL and the Royal Borough of Greenwich, we’ve been investigating the future of autonomous driving to develop a new generation of risks models so that such technology could be introduced safely in the future. You’ll find an article about the culmination of our work in this project within this issue of Driven. Working towards any significant goal takes commitment and ambition. It requires collaboration with partners and it requires innovative thinking. These are the four values that we hold sacred at The Floow as we execute on our mission of safer and smarter mobility. I hope you enjoy reading this issue of Driven. As ever, if you have any feedback or would like to start a conversation with us about any aspect of our work, please email me via info@thefloow.com.
One example of successful, purposeful partnership was the subject of the conversation I had with our friend Danny Maco from CSAA during this year’s Dig-In industry event in Austin (TX). This issue of Driven includes a write-up of that conversation, which tracks the progress we’ve made working with CSAA over the past two years and how together we’re realising a shared
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The Future of Risk: How Behavioural Monitoring Can Positively Impact The Future of Insurance Article written by David James and Dr Lisa Dorn
How do we envision the future of insurance, mobility and risk in 2019? The short answer is that it’s difficult to know because changes to technology are so fastmoving that its having an effect on everyone from insurers and local authorities to mobility providers and road users, including drivers, passengers and cyclists. In the previous issue of Driven, our CEO Aldo Monteforte set out his strategic vision for The Floow and our future development, based on six key trends surrounding the future of mobility, to ensure that we remain focused on helping our clients to successfully progress in this new world. One key area of Aldo’s strategic vision focuses on Behavioural Monitoring which allows us to better understand driver behaviour so risk can be priced more accurately, the future of our cities and road networks can be better planned with safety in mind and safer driving can be encouraged through driver education and the inclusion of social sciences into telematics propositions.
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Photo by Alexa Suter on Unsplash
This makes sense for The Floow which is a company built on a mission to make mobility safer and smarter for everyone. This mission has steered the development of understanding into the benefits that incorporating social science techniques into our telematics propositions could have on improving risk profiles and road safety. As a result, our Chief Education Officer and Associate Professor of Driver Behaviour at Cranfield University, Dr Lisa Dorn, began researching and developing what would later become FloowCoach, our driver coaching programme. This initially launched with the UK’s largest personal motor insurer, Direct Line Group, back in October 2015.
Encouraging Safety and Engagement FloowCoach was designed to take the scores generated by The Floow’s world-class scoring algorithms and provide tailored feedback,
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education and coaching to the highest risk drivers, those in the bottom 10-20% who represent an increased risk of making a claim during the lifetime of the policy, with the end goal being to encourage safer driving behaviours.
“Behavioural change techniques are the “active ingredients” of any intervention that lead to a change in behaviour...” The FloowCoach programme itself takes the key
FloowCoach is provided through a number of
elements that have led to successful coaching
telephone-based coaching sessions which are
outcomes in previous research by using specific
delivered by our highly-trained behavioural
behavioural change techniques. The evidence
coaches. Coaching is defined as the guided
pointed to how to influence risky driving
facilitation of behavioural change and found to be effective across hundreds of studies including hard to change habitual behaviours. Our coaches are trained to facilitate enhanced driver safety by developing the customer’s self-directed learning skills.
habits through the use of behavioural change techniques. Behavioural change techniques are the “active ingredients” of any intervention that lead to a change in behaviour so several were woven into the structure and content of the FloowCoach programme from the outset. For example, during the coaching sessions, the customer is motivated to focus on what they consider to be the key benefits of improving their score. Then achievable goals are agreed upon with progress against these goals being discussed and measured in subsequent sessions. Other key behavioural change techniques include positive reinforcement to motivate the customer towards further improvement over the duration of the programme. The unique insights which we gain from including social sciences within our telematics insurance propositions provides insurers with a true understanding of the risk on their book plus it provides them with the opportunity to engage customers about their behaviour behind the wheel, in order to improve their scores and their risk profile.
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We believe that this will encourage customer loyalty by supporting customers towards being safer drivers. Customers who make a positive change may then be given the opportunity to potentially gain a cheaper price for their insurance policy, or gain rewards and discounts. Over the last three and a half years, The Floow has assisted more than 1300 drivers with FloowCoach, and our latest research shows that for every 100 drivers in the lowest-scoring decile who have completed this programme, 13 accidents are avoided compared to standard feedback mechanisms. Our work on FloowCoach has led to further work in this area such as incorporating detailed journey feedback into our apps to help drivers easily access tips to help them improve their driving style. Additionally, we have developed a rewards module that can easily be incorporated into our standard FloowDrive product. This module offers drivers points for successfully reaching or maintaining positive scores, which can be redeemed against a catalogue of rewards specified by the insurer according to the demographics of their customer base. Our research shows that reward programmes such as this can improve scores by as much as 54%, having a bigger behavioural impact, particularly for low-scoring drivers, than only offering an insurance discount at year end.
Continuing to Innovate But despite all this work, insurance is widely viewed as a grudge purchase and loyalty to a
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provider can be low in markets such as the UK
changing market? For our behavioural monitoring
where purchasing decisions are driven by cost
solutions, we believe the answer to this lies in the
rather than service, brand heritage or expertise.
power of digital‌
A recent study into consumer attitudes by
Creating Seamless Customer Experiences with Behavioural Monitoring Techniques
customer engagement, loyalty and lifetime optimisation specialist, ELLO Media, found that 35% of UK consumers feel no loyalty to their insurance provider. Around 21% of consumers
Our aim is to remove all friction from the customer
said they had switched insurance providers in
experience to make safe mobility easier for the
the past year, with cost cited by 83% of those
driver to accomplish. One way to do this focuses
surveyed as the key influence in their decision.
on making use of automation tools to deliver
But these figures will come as no surprise to many insurers. Last year, The Floow conducted
actionable format.
a YouGov poll with insurance industry decision-
A great way of doing this would be through the
makers to understand their thoughts on the future
use of the chatbot which many providers are
of the insurance industry. When asked about their biggest concern, 30% said they were concerned about not being able to retain customers/ policyholders while 36% said their biggest concern was not being able to remain competitive on price. All this data points to the key issue facing insurers at the moment, how do they remain competitive enough to attract new customers, whilst also providing a good experience in order to retain their existing policyholders? While behavioural monitoring techniques like those mentioned above help insurers to deal with this issue, there is still a long way to go to create insurance propositions which truly add value to the lives of policyholders.
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driver coaching to app users in a timely and
already making use of across the insurance telematics market. Chatbots are seen as a highly engaging tool and sectors including banking and entertainment are using them to cultivate personalised engagement with their products and simplify the experience for the end-user. A great example of how a chatbot has been used in an innovative way is Liberty South Africa’s Liberty Short-Term app, which was featured in the first issue of Driven. The chatbot they created is accessible via social media messaging platforms and is used throughout the lifecycle of the policy to handle tasks including generating a quote and handling issues which arise throughout the duration of the policy quickly and efficiently. The chatbot also allows users to authenticate
Where does The Floow sit in all this and how
their identity by uploading identity documents
can we help insurers to deliver great customer
such as a driver’s license to obtain their quote.
experiences and remain competitive in a fast-
Drivers then have the opportunity to prove their
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their insurance policy, putting the power in their hands to create the experience which works best for them. In an article for insurancethoughtleadership.com, Insurance Practice Lead at Globant, Sean Kennedy, spoke about the importance of this; “By making it easier for customers to answer common questions and perform routine activities like filing a claim, chatbots reposition customers at the center of insurance processes.” Photo by Jaromir Kavan on Unsplash
safety behind the wheel by passing an initial ‘driver test’ which requires drivers to record trips in the app over the course of 300km and during
A chatbot can also compliment other digital customer engagement techniques such as rewards programmes (as mentioned previously) or engagement capabilities that seek to gamify the user experience within telematics solutions,
the course of the test, the driver receives regular
such as leaderboards, streaks and badges.
feedback from the chatbot to help and encourage
How are we doing this?
them to pass the test through driving behaviour improvements. They are leading the way in the market by effectively using technology to target specific customers (in this case, young professionals) and improve the service received by a customer by simplifying processes and providing added value to the standard insurance experience. For insurers, chatbots provide them with the opportunity to easily encourage drivers to engage with their driving behaviour and scores to develop improvements through the use of helpful tips and positive reinforcements. A chatbot is also a viable tool to support a coaching methodology alongside interacting with score feedback. The
Although these capabilities are not typically part of a standard insurance proposition, they can help to encourage engagement with telematics apps and driving behaviour, which is why The Floow is focusing our attention on understanding what it is that drivers, the end-users of these apps, want from their insurance provider. As a result, user research has become a vital part of our product development cycle and after our recent move to agile we can input findings straight into future iterations of current products if we discover a clear need for a particular capability or require a change to a piece of functionality to make it more user friendly.
introduction of a chatbot for delivering driver
The findings gained from user research also
coaching can allow policyholders to self-serve
prove valuable for our clients who benefit from
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Photo by Vanveen JF on Unsplash
“Behavioural monitoring and change techniques... offer policyholders the tools to make positive improvements... to become safer drivers...�
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these insights into the market, helping them successfully navigate the future of mobility and launch successful telematics insurance propositions that are of real value to their policyholders.
In Summary The changes in technology can be difficult to understand or prepare for but they provide insurers with an opportunity to deliver an insurance experience that is rewarding and beneficial for the policyholder. Behavioural monitoring and change techniques provide insurance companies with the opportunity to offer their policyholders the tools to make positive improvements to their driving behaviours to become safer drivers on the roads. At The Floow, we remain focused on this key area of our vision for the future of mobility, to ensure that the solutions we deliver now and in the future are successful in helping insurers to navigate this new world of mobility and customer expectations. Our focus is to become a true partner that our clients trust to deliver great solutions, providing them with the knowledge and capabilities to remain competitive and fulfill the ever-changing requirements of their customers. All this combined allows us to work towards fulfilling our mission - to make mobility safer and smarter for all.
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Collaborating For a Safe, Autonomous Future Article written by Dr Sam Chapman
Every press article or news report you read about ‘driverless’ cars or autonomous mobility seems to be accompanied by an illustration of people relaxing in the back of a ‘pod’, which looks nothing like one of today’s passenger vehicles, proceeding down a motorway or through the busy streets of a city. The passengers are sat facing each other, relaxing, chatting, or playing games. Disengaged from the driving process, they are completely confident in the safety of their vehicle. When I see these illustrations I am often struck by the enormity of the task to transition the mobility options we have today into a future where this sort of driverless vehicle could be the norm. But before we run away with how hard it’s going to be it’s important to remember that semiautonomous features have been present in the cars that we’ve all been driving for decades. Automatic braking assistance and cruise control are types of semi-autonomous features that we use without thinking. However there’s a big difference between a feature that can help the driver and those that allow them to relinquish control of the vehicle entirely. Importantly, the defining element in moving to full autonomy is human behaviour.
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Many proponents of autonomous mobility say that if every vehicle on our road was fully programmable then this could make our roads safer. After all, human error, human negligence or poor decision making is considered to be the most frequent cause of accidents and collision. However, what about the fact that our roads are also populated by pedestrians crossing the street, or cyclists weaving in and out of traffic? They are still just as likely to make errors in their decisions which could lead to accidents. Some of the most notorious incidents and fatalities concerning autonomous vehicles have happened not because the vehicle’s system being used has failed, but because a human road user has made a mistake, for example, stepping out into the road without leaving enough time for the vehicle to spot them and take evasive action. It is these variables of human behaviour that makes the introduction of full or part-autonomy such a complicated thing to get right. And it’s this very complexity that we have been addressing as part of the UK Government-funded MOVE_UK initiative which has just concluded after three years of work. MOVE_UK’s objectives have been to complete the ‘connected validation’ required to properly understand the parameters required for a safe, autonomous future and to fuel helpful thinking around how the nature of risk will be considered when this is a reality. The project has gathered an enormous set of frequent and wide ranging vehicle, sensor and vehicle control usage data across thousands
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Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash
“Importantly, the defining element in moving to full autonomy is human behaviour.” DRIVEN MAGAZINE
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concern is helping them to accurately assess risk. MOVE_UK has reintroduced us to some different means of considering risks emerging from human behaviours. Our current measurement and scores of driving risk includes measures such as speed compared to other road users (on the same stretch of road), the smoothness of driving (measured by the relative aggression of acceleration, cornering and braking), mobile distraction (the degree of distraction introduced by using or handling a smartphone whilst driving), as well as factors like time of day and the continuous length of a journey. MOVE_UK has reminded us that drivers rarely of journeys completed in London’s Royal Borough of Greenwich. This has been a team effort combining collaboration with Bosch, who provided complex in-car monitoring devices, Jaguar Land Rover, whose vehicles were used for journeys, London Borough of Greenwich, whose workers completed the journeys monitored, TRL, the respected transport research organisation, and Direct Line Group, a UK leader in insurance.
follow the rules or conventions of the road as offered in the Highway Code. A ‘perfect journey’ is impossible to achieve - not because you or I are physically incapable of achieving that, but because there are so many negative variables introduced by other road users or the road conditions themselves. Cars are becoming increasingly ‘connected’ so your car could provide all sorts of additional risk insights.
MOVE_UK has created a rich dataset that will contribute to the careful planning required for the introduction of autonomous mobility options. The Floow’s role has been to analyse and make sense of this data. We determined the absolute accuracy of GPS data and its reliability to inform on human behaviours, as well as expanding our knowledge of which behaviours can be observed using GPS data. Confidence in our data is important for our work with motor insurers because our primary
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Photo by Mavis CW on Unsplash
For example, a forward-facing camera or ‘dashcam’ combined with radar equipment will not only provide an accurate record of incidents, but it will also enable us to score you on dangerous behaviours like ‘tail-gating’ based on the distance a driver maintains to the vehicle in front at a given speed. Other scores that reached the prototype stage due to our work on MOVE_UK include ‘courtesy’ (based on how the driver chooses to deploy forward-facing lights), ‘passenger distraction’ (the extent to which a driver’s behaviour is influenced by their passengers) and ‘dwell judgement’ (how good we are at determining if it is safe to pull out at a junction). Of course, exactly what data is available in the future will vary between manufacturers and by vehicle type, but such a large data lake will prove extremely valuable to insurers because of its potential to power more insightful analytics. It will be some time until autonomy becomes the norm rather than the exception. We believe that the journey to get us there will be an evolution not a revolution. There will be no switch flicked where all of a sudden driverless vehicles will occupy the roads alone. Human drivers will still be around, in charge of vehicles, taking decisions, and making mistakes. MOVE_UK is just one of a number of initiatives and test beds that will be necessary to move us along that evolutionary journey. We are grateful to the collaboration and partnership shown by Bosch, DLG, TRL, JLR and London Borough of Greenwich to complete this fascinating project. You can find out more about MOVE_UK and the initiative’s findings on the MOVE_UK website.
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Driving to True Partnership in UBI: The Floow and CSAA in Conversation at the Dig-In Conference in Austin, Texas Article written by Aldo Monteforte In the recent Dig-In industry event in Austin, Texas, I was delighted to be joined on stage by Danny Maco, Head of Telematics Mobile & Connected Products for CSAA Insurance Group. The Floow team has been working with CSAA for more than two years, and over this time, our relationship has transformed. In our conversation at Dig-In we explored the journey that we’ve been on together. This article presents part of the conversation and some of the principles that we talked about in Austin.
The Importance of Telematics Partnership to CSAA
Photo by Andrei Stratu on Unsplash
Danny Maco: CSAA Insurance Group has been providing AAA-branded insurance to members for more than 100 years. Today we’re surrounded by disruption and all the opportunity that brings. As a team and enterprise, we understand that customers have expectations in engagement and user experience that we need to take to a new level. Through telematics products and technologies, we have all the ingredients to fundamentally change the relationship between the carrier and
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the customer. These programmes provide us with access to data that provides real time insights, converts that data into individual risk profiles, and - allows us to offer features and incremental improvements with greater frequency. Telematics genuinely has the potential to offer our policyholders the right product at the right time and for the right price. At CSAA we’re all-in on lean start-up, agile methodologies and design thinking, but that type of transformation is very difficult; even if you’re in control of all the levers it’s still a lot of work. When you add projects dependent on external partners into the equation, it introduces a whole new level of complexity and if partners aren’t aligned with new operational models, the benefits that can come from agile methodologies can be negated, resulting in confusion and inefficiencies. Working to successfully extend these lean concepts into a partnership has been our objective. While The Floow and CSAA have deployed successful UBI
relationship. From the vendor perspective we might say “The client doesn’t really get it, they don’t understand the complexity of what we’re doing.” Folks within the client organisation would say that “The vendor doesn’t appreciate our goals or objectives.” This sort of relationship won’t flourish or last long! A transactional relationship sees both sides looking to extract the most and give away the least. The insurer may be inclined to ‘switch horses’ to a different vendor at the first opportunity. This is not a good place to be in if you want to deliver great solutions that might appeal to end-users and achieve mass market adoption. Then we have collaborative relationships where both organisations respect each other and are
propositions, in truth it hasn’t been “all rainbows and unicorns” getting to this point!
Transforming the Vendor/Client Relationship Aldo Monteforte: Telematics is a potential game changer for the industry because it can touch every aspect of an insurance operation. But the successful implementation of a telematics programme can be very hard. On many occasions, Danny and I have discussed what makes a partnership bad, good or great and in these conversations we have identified 4 kinds of partnerships. At one end of the spectrum, the place no one wants to be is in an adversarial
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willing to work together for the long-term. There
Step 2: Internal Reflection – this is where real
is deep mutual understanding at both the project
leadership was required. It was about moving
and product level.
beyond negative feedback whilst using it as a
We’ve always believed that it’s possible to go beyond this to a true partnership. This is when
done to eliminate issues and move forward.
both teams feel united as one in pursuit of
Step 3: The Pivot – The team starts working
the same goal. In our industry that is a bond
together to make fundamental improvements.
cemented by the objective of making mobility
One pivot The Floow went through was
safer and smarter. Using our technology and
the transition from a waterfall to an agile
engaging with it can encourage drivers to adjust
methodology. Another pivot was the introduction
their behaviour and ultimately save lives.
of in-residence support – a full time Floow
So how do we engineer a true partnership? In our journey with CSAA this was a process that took several steps...
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source to direct where the real work needs to get
representative within the insurer organisation to guide the process and support the relationship at all times. Step 4: Getting Better – just like an athlete, hard training provides aching muscles but before long
Step 1: The Shock – The Floow delivered an early
people start to enjoy the new mode of working,
product that had flaws. The feedback from CSAA
celebrating successes and also sharing the focus
was difficult to hear!
on solving problems when things go wrong.
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Key Dependencies for Delivering ‘the Ultimate’ Customer Experience with UBI
insights as they reveal themselves and convert
Danny Maco: As we applied lean concepts
emphasis the role of the agile process in this. The
to meet the goal of delivering the ultimate customer experience there were a number of key dependencies: 1) The Data: We need data that’s actionable, insightful and drawn from every part of the consumer journey. It must be collected at the project level as well as at the user engagement level. Our customers rely on us to identify and protect them from risks so not only do we need driving behavioural data but we also need to have the ability to evolve our own scoring algorithm, to draw our own insights and leverage the expertise that The Floow brings to the table. Our systems
them into improvements. We need to be able to test our assumptions and hypotheses on real users and iterate quickly. It’s impossible to overtransition from waterfall to agile was critical in achieving the speed we’re looking for. Aldo Monteforte: We developed a number of elements here. The most important was to deploy an in-residence, Floow ambassador dedicated full-time to CSAA. If you want to move at speed you need to have a very deep understanding of the partner’s needs and this helped us to achieve it. CSAA have a well-developed agile methodology so it was necessary for us to adapt our model to their rhythm and cadence. Now we have a dedicated agile team synchronised with CSAA’s three-week sprint cycles and have
have to be able to get this data quickly and
introduced shared design tools that enable real-
reliably.
time collaboration on prototyping UX/UI features
Aldo Monteforte: There are 2 levels of data…of course there’s data showing each journey from A to B. But the CSAA team is also intensely focused
before any time is spent coding. Danny Maco: 3) Trust: CSAA has been successful for more than 100 years because we never
on data relating to how users interact with the
forget how important it is to earn the trust of our
experience that we craft for them. One way we do
customers each and every day. When members
this is introducing analytics tools as a core part of
grant us this level and volume of data, there’s
the proposition. I believe every client will benefit
a heightened expectation and explicit promise
from analytics based on the understanding of
that we should be trusted as the protector and
user behaviour to support the definition of new
steward of this data when using it to:
features. Danny Maco: 2) Speed: Having data available is necessary but alone it’s not sufficient. It’s only
a) Accurately rate risk. b) Encourage safer driving behaviours.
helpful if you can turn the data into customer
c) Fairly reward those who make the effort to
value in the form of capabilities or a personalised
modify their behaviour for their safety and that of
experience. We need to be able to act on new
others on the road.
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Our systems and the data they process must be reliable and accurate, ensuring the highest levels of integrity to deliver on that promise. If something goes wrong, we must be able to discover and rectify that before there’s any impact to our customers. It’s important that our telematics partner understands the gravity of these responsibilities. Aldo Monteforte: This is the most important dependency of all. We go to extreme measures
where it’s OK to challenge each other. Get your expectations on the table early and be totally honest. It’s through these challenges that you achieve the most traction and reward. Aldo Monteforte: The intention is always to produce wonderful products. There are no shortcuts. Challenges that come from ambition can put a relationship through pressure but achieving true partnership is how you’ll achieve exceptional results.
to ensure that our monitoring systems, alerts and operational controls inform both organisations with complete transparency in real time. This allows us to intervene proactively and give consumers full confidence that their valuable mobility data is being treated in full compliance with applicable regulatory frameworks. Scores have financial consequences for drivers and insurers so we monitor our scoring methodologies to constantly check that they’re performing as expected.
Key Take-aways Danny Maco: As a result of our collaboration, we’ve been able to launch a number of products with a small team in a short timeframe. We gather customer insights with each iteration and get better at satisfying the needs of our customers. With each release cycle we get faster and faster. Agile is powerful but just because you can pivot doesn’t mean you should. Those decisions have real consequences in terms of delivery and capacity for your partners. Finally, insurers and their telematics partners should enter into the relationship with humility; expect to learn from each other and nurture an environment
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Photo by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash
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Photo by Andrei Stratu on Unsplash
“Achieving true partnership is how you'll achieve exceptional results.”
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Spotlight on…
Our Pricing and Actuarial Team Article written by Lucy Eruero
as working on telematics programmes with clients around the world to enable them to advise and work closely with clients; sharing experiences and know-how whilst also taking the time to listen and learn from every new engagement. On any typical day, the team will be talking with prospects or clients about how they can help them build scoring solutions that are appropriate to their customer demographics and how they can work with their internal teams to develop their own unique IP. When they are not out on the road or on conference calls with clients or prospects, they review the scoring management information and audit reports from data science to ensure that everything is working as expected and present
The Floow’s Pricing and Actuarial team help clients maximise the value from their telematics programme. They act as the key lynchpin between the client’s actuarial teams, our analytics teams and industry developments, and as such aim to collaborate with our clients to innovate and generate insights that improve underwriting and therefore drive competitive advantage and commercial success. Telematics gives clients insights into risk that are far more granular and predictive than traditional rating factors, however, telematics is the new kid on the block and often lacks the volume of real world data that insurers like to see when building risk and pricing models. Our P&A team therefore use their vast experience of running actuarial teams within insurers as well
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these results to our clients. They spend a lot of time working with the business development and client development teams to understand the technical requirements of our clients and feed this back internally, whilst managing expectations. But perhaps more importantly they work with the data science teams to develop new and enhanced scoring and other analytics including elements that are requested by our clients, as well as advising on and checking claims analysis regressions where they try to improve our scores and make them better at predicting our clients’ claims experience. We talked to Andy Goldby and Jonathan Smith from our Pricing and Actuarial team to find out more about what they do, their experience and what they enjoy about working at The Floow.
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Andy, what have been your proudest moments since joining The Floow? I can think of two moments that immediately spring to mind. Firstly, Uri Levine, the founder of Waze, seeking me out personally at the Chicago TU event. Apparently, as a leading telematics scoring expert at the conference, he wanted to gather my views on telematics and scoring with the possible inclusion of this into his latest venture. Secondly, and probably more importantly, working
Andy Goldby, Chief Actuary
collaboratively with ACG and the USA Department
Andy is a highly respected general insurance industry executive, and has been a qualified general insurance actuary for over 20 years. Prior to The Floow he spent 5 years as the Motor Underwriting and Pricing Director at Direct Line Group (the largest motor insurer in the UK), where he managed a team of 45 actuaries, statisticians and underwriters who deal with the risk and market pricing for all brands under the DLG umbrella.
smartphone backed telematics insurance policy
At DLG, he was the sponsor of various pricing projects including external data sources and telematics. Prior to that, he was the Motor Director at Groupama.
in all aspects of our products, including:
Andy also has significant experience of industry issues built up over many years of active participation on ABI Motor Committee, MIB Levy Committee and various actuarial working parties, including one which won the Brian Hey prize for a Giro paper on the Winner’s Curse and frequently speaks at conferences.
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of Insurance to enable ACG to release the first in the USA and then to go on and prove that the scores that we had hypothesised were great predictors of their claims experience and required only minor further improvement before rolling them out to more states. How does your role influence the products delivered by The Floow? My role gives me the opportunity to be involved
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Understanding the client’s challenges and designing new product features that will help them meet these challenges
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Building confidence in The Floow’s abilities and telematics generally
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Driving new initiatives and supporting the launch of new products
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Proving that telematics is working
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• •
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Providing insightful management information to inform decision making Facilitating internal and external continuous refinement of products and solutions
This is all a crucial part of ensuring we continue to deliver products that meet the needs of our clients and innovate alongside the ever-changing developments in this market.
drivers can understand and react to - giving them the ability to control their insurance premium
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Leverage my consultancy skills to enable clients and, often more importantly, regulators to get bought into these scores and telematics generally
If we get this right we can have fun and improve road safety - what is not to love?
Why do you like working at The Floow? I come from a background of insurance where although things moved fairly slowly there was constant arms race to generate new insights from data; to subdivide drivers into groups of similar chance of having an accident by using proxy data like age or postcode where the customer has no way of influencing these factors and that may not relate directly to that particular customers driving ability. This has never really seemed to be ‘fair’ to me. Why should a safe driver pay the same premium as a more dangerous thrill seeker of the same age and demographics? Working for The Floow has given me the ability to: • •
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Work in a faster paced, more agile organisation Be curious and dive deeper into driving psychology and actions that are likely to cause accidents Use my actuarial skills to develop driving scores from scratch that; •
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reflect these actions and do not rely on proxy factors;
Jonathan Smith, Pricing and Underwriting Director Jonathan has over 17 years general insurance experience having worked for two of the UK’s largest motor insurers; Aviva and Direct Line Group. His expertise spans pricing & underwriting, data science, proposition development, change management and IT. Previously Head of Telematics Pricing at Direct Group Plc, Jonathan has extensive experience of launching telematics programmes and integrating insights from them into pricing and underwriting
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business models and processes; and in doing so driving commercial value. As a recognised expert in the field of telematics, Jonathan has spoken at industry conferences and been called upon by the Police to provide analytical support and expert witness testimony in court. Jonathan also holds an MA from The University of Cambridge where he studied Computer Science & General Engineering. Jonathan, what attracted you to working in telematics? My motivation for working in telematics is to deliver more accurate and fairer pricing to drivers around the world whilst simultaneously helping my insurance clients grow and profit from the competitive advantage that telematics can deliver. Telematics is all about using actual driving data to quantify risk; pulling apart the good drivers from the bad ones and I work with my clients to embed that knowledge into their risk and pricing models. Internally, I work closely with our data science team to continuously improve and develop new scores. This works well with my background in Engineering, both from a technical perspective of how devices function and the impact this has on data through to the pragmatism and ability to reduce complex mechanisms and systems into
fairer pricing. It is becoming more mainstream and therefore the rigour and focus that it gets is much greater. As a department and a company we will continue to push ourselves to provide insight into risk that is superior to both our competitors and the existing rating factors that are used within the industry. We have a culture of building capability that will serve our clients’ needs both now and in the future and we will continue to focus on the horizon and steer the industry. I believe that telematics is fundamental to the evolution of the insurtech space. With the proliferation of connected devices and the changes that we are seeing in mobility I believe it will form the foundation of insurer rating capability over the next decade. Why do you like working at The Floow? I enjoy working at the Floow because I enjoy being at the front edge of a change in the way insurers use data and manage their risk. I am very fortunate to meet clients at an early stage in the sales process and to continue working with them throughout their telematics journey with The Floow. I find it incredibly rewarding as I get to observe their success and make some new friends along the way. To find out more about our Pricing and Actuarial capability, email info@thefloow.com.
smaller, more understandable elements. What is your vision for the future of your department and/or the Insurtech space? Telematics is about giving insurers a better view of risk to achieve competitive advantage and
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Event Summary - BIBA and DIG-IN Article written by Charlotte Pearson It’s been a busy couple of months for The Floow as we take our solutions and capabilities to two of the biggest insurance events in the UK and US. We attended the BIBA conference in Manchester in mid-May where we debuted our broker proposition and at the end of May, we attended the Dig-In conference in Austin, Texas where our CEO, Aldo Monteforte, had a fireside chat with Head of Telematics, Mobile and Connected Products at CSAA, Danny Maco, where they spoke about our work in partnership together.
The Floow at BIBA Conference Manchester, UK - 14th to 16th May 2019 In May, a team from The Floow attended the annual BIBA conference in Manchester where we debuted our new suite of broker propositions designed to provide flexibility when getting started with telematics. These propositions allow brokers to get out to market painlessly, with speed and confidence, quickly delivering value to brokers and all those within their ecosystem. Our broker propositions cover three different areas, these are: •
Test and Learn - ideal for ‘try before you buy’ proposition, the ‘test and learn’ option allows brokers to get out to market fast with a smartphone proposition which helps them select the best risk onto their book.
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•
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Broker-led - ideal for brokers wanting to bring a Managing General Agent (MGA) or ‘Broker Owned’ proposition to market, the broker-led option enables the development of a unique proposition which can be tailored to specific business needs using a smartphone or deviceintegrated approach. Open Market - this option is ideal for insurers wanting to attract brokers into their ecosystem, providing an open market, device-agnostic product using standardised driver scores based on The Floow’s scoring platform which is proven to be highly predictive of claims.
As well as launching our new broker proposition at BIBA, we had some great conversations and welcomed many contacts old and new onto our booth to enjoy a go on our VR driving experience simulator. If you’d like to find out more about our time at BIBA, you can check out our blog about the event.
The Floow at Dig-In Austin, Texas - 29th to 31st May 2019 At the end of May, a number of US and senior colleagues from The Floow attended the DigIn conference. Last year, we demoed our recently released FloowDrive product, we were overwhelmed with the response to this new product and its game-changing capabilities for the market. This year, Aldo hosted a fireside chat with CSAA's Danny Maco, where they spoke about our work in partnership together over the last two years and how our relationship has developed to one of mutual trust, respect and true partnership to allow for commercial success for both parties. It was a great opportunity to talk in depth with a number of different insurance companies about our ability to score and build IP around existing telematics data. This partnership model is one we are particularly proud of and to which we apply significant resources as a business, as discussed by Aldo and Danny. It was also interesting to hear more from the wider tech industry, such as Apple founder Steve Wozniak who spoke about AI and the potential it has to stifle creativity and innovation as it can limit the experiences we are exposed to. An interesting thought for The Floow to consider as a technology company focused on innovation and developing pioneering products and services which meet and exceed client needs. If you’d like to find out more about our time at Dig-In, you can check out our blog about the event.
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Upcoming Events
Our Chief Innovation Officer, Dr Sam Chapman, at Low Carbon Vehicle Event 4th - 5th September 2019 This September, The Floow’s Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Dr Sam Chapman, will be attending the UK’s Premier Low Carbon Vehicle Event in Millbrook, Bedfordshire. The event will feature a technology exhibition and ride and drive sessions where conference attendees will have the opportunity to drive vehicles fitted with some of the latest low-carbon technology.
The autumn/fall timeframe is always a busy one for industry events. Below are some of the events that we’ll be participating in from September through November:
There will also be a number of seminars taking
The Floow at Insurance Innovators
Transport.
13th - 14th November 2019 The Floow’s team will be attending this year’s Insurance Innovators conference in London at the QEII Centre. The annual Insurance Innovators conference is Europe’s leading insurance conference where the very best of the insurance and insurtech industries come together to challenge the traditional world of insurance. The Floow are Gold sponsors of this year’s event and will be speaking at the event on one of the four stages, alongside 120 other speakers, discussing one of this year’s key content areas - Tech Game Changers, Innovation, Data & Analytics, IOT and Customer Loyalty.
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place across the two-day event focusing on themes including: Air Quality, Design Engineering, Ultra-Low Emission Vehicles and Energy for
Other Events The Floow’s Team Are Attending: TU - Connected Car Insurance USA: 4th - 5th September 2019, Chicago IL Insurtech Connect: 23rd - 25th September 2019, Las Vegas NV Connected Insurance USA: 20th - 21st November 2019, Chicago IL If you are attending any of these events then we hope to see you there. For more information about our products and services, email us at info@thefloow.com
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31 Photo by Fineas Anton on Unsplash
The Floow Ltd The Floow Campus, Wicker Lane, Sheffield, S3 8HQ +44 (0) 114 270 1114 The Floow North America 20300 Superior Rd. Suite 250 Taylor, MI 48180 USA +1 855 447 9252 info@thefloow.com www.thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow
