#1 | March 2019 | EMEA Edition | thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow
The Future of Risk: The Impacts of New and Autonomous Technologies
Driving Actuarial Innovation with Telematics How Long-Term Partnerships Can Deliver Significant Benefits to Insurers and Their Policyholders Spotlight On… Our Data Science Team The Floow’s Vision and Strategic Direction
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WELCOME 2
Welcome to Driven, The Floow’s quarterly business updates publication for the EMEA market.
In this edition 4 - 5 Letter from our CEO: Aldo Monteforte 6 - 15
he Future of Risk: The Impacts of New T Technology written by Dr Sam Chapman
16 - 25 Driving Actuarial Innovation with Telematics written by Andy Goldby 26 - 37 Working Towards the Future of Mobility Through Our Involvement in UK and European Research and Development Projects written by Dr Sam Chapman 38 - 41 How Long-Term Partnerships Can Deliver Significant Benefits to Insurers and Their Policyholders written by Claire Sargeant 42 - 45
Spotlight On… Our Data Science Team written by Charlotte Pearson
46 - 51 The Floow’s Vision and Strategic Direction written by Aldo Monteforte
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 clients and their customers. We were founded in 2012 by CEO Aldo Monteforte, CIO Dr Sam Chapman and Paul Ridgway 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
CEO Aldo Monteforte & CIO Dr Sam Chapman
growth with our team now reaching 110 people, 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
The Floow Ltd,
road safety. This is why we will be focusing
The Floow Campus, Wicker Lane,
heavily on how we see the future of mobility unfolding, what we are working on to ensure we
Sheffield, S3 8HQ
are ahead of the curve and how we are working
+44 (0) 114 270 1114
with our clients to make sure that they are ready
info@thefloow.com
for the challenges this fast-changing market will bring. The future of mobility and insurance is
www.thefloow.com
uncertain 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 Spring edition of Driven, our quarterly magazine which aims to encompass insights, ideas, best practices and innovation in insurance telematics. We had some great feedback about our first issue so this time around we wanted to focus on some of the areas you told us you’d like to hear more about. Amongst the articles you’ll read include one from Dr Sam Chapman, my co-founder here at The Floow and our Chief Innovation Officer. Sam talks about the future of mobility and how telematics-based insights are informing a new paradigm when it comes to risk pricing and modelling, and will enable a future which could fully integrate autonomous mobility. Whilst some of these changes represent the potential for complex disruption to our insurance partners, others will create opportunity for differentiation. It’s this angle that Andy Goldby, our Chief Actuary, picks up on with regards to how telematics can be the basis for better business outcomes, better customer insights and better partnership - all built upon a platform of better, more sophisticated scores.
These are issues that the majority of our clients are interested in, and all of them are keen to learn from our experiences of working with industry peers to address them. It’s in that spirit that this issue of Driven also includes an article reflecting on the 2 billion+ miles that we’ve scored during more than five years of working with Direct Line Group in the UK. The fruits of that relationship include more than £50 million of savings achieved for young drivers benefitting from telematics insurance policies - an excellent customer-centric outcome. These truly are exciting times and I believe that there’s never been a better time to be part of and contributing to the transformation of the insurance industry to make mobility safer and smarter for everyone. I hope that you enjoy reading Driven! Until next time…
Future mobility and scoring sophistication are two of the six pillars of strategic focus that we’re centering our efforts around here at The Floow. In my article for Driven, I talk about these alongside four others: mobile-first, the power of behavioural conditioning, a touchless claims experience and OEM data integration.
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The Future of Risk: The Impacts of New Technology Article written by Dr Sam Chapman
With 1.3 million fatalities occurring on the world’s roads every year, and an estimated 60 million receiving serious injuries, road risk is fundamentally one of the biggest impacts on our wellbeing. In fact, road risk causes at least 22 times as many fatalities as warfare.
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Despite these horrific figures, the situation used to be a lot worse. As new awareness, regulation and safer systems have been adopted the risks have continued to decrease over time. Add to that, an ever upward increase in vehicle miles travelled, and this is a very positive trend.
understand emerging changes and the risk they may alter. The work looks to evolve regulation and data usage to decrease the impacts of emergent risk from new technology.
However, a closer look at more recent history highlights a decline in the rate of this risk reduction, with gains levelling off at the same time technology is still advancing.
In order to understand these impacts, it is vital to understand how risk is mitigated.
So as we continue to add new technologies, what will be the future effect on risk?
the surrounding area. However over the many years of mobility numerous mitigations have been evolved to reduce underlying risks. Although mitigations are numerous they can be broadly grouped into three key areas that collectively work to reduce risks during travel:
Investigations in this area by The Floow have led to numerous world leading research projects, for example the MOVE_UK project. MOVE_UK brings together world leading organisations to investigate the impact of new vehicle technologies upon risk. This aims to better
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The risk of any vehicle travelling at speed is inherently high for both vehicles and people in
•
Vehicle safety
•
Infrastructure safety
•
Behavioural safety
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Photo by Per Lööv on Unsplash
With 1.3 million fatalities occurring on the world’s roads every year, and an estimated 60 million receiving serious injuries, road risk is fundamentally one of the biggest impacts on our wellbeing.
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Whilst accidents can only occur where all
(In the US, this gives a 39% decline in reported
mitigations fail, this does not mean that this will
rear end collisions in vehicles fitted with this
always happen, rather that this is where the
technology).
risk lies. However, each mitigation influences each other in a complex and changing picture of risk and therefore changes made may have unpredictable impacts and unwanted side effects. For example, a project called the Munich taxi driver study looked at the behavioural impact of the introduction of ABS. Researchers studied collision rates and observed the driving behaviour of taxi drivers with and without ABS. They found there was no significant difference in their collision rates – in fact, the rate for drivers of ABSequipped vehicles was slightly higher than the
Vehicle safety Vehicle risk mitigations relate to three key areas: 1) Ensuring a safe operational fleet This includes mandated vehicle checks, such as the MOT in the UK, the vehicle recall process, type approval processes and NCAP crash safety rating.
rate for those without ABS.
Each of these play a crucial part in keeping risk
The study revealed that the drivers with ABS-
to a minimum. However, with the ever changing
equipped vehicles braked harder, cornered
world of technology, none can ever be fully
more sharply, left less space in front of them, and
effective.
failed to maintain lane positioning and merge
Vehicle checks on more advanced cars need to
with other traffic in a safe manner. This was likely to be due to the drivers feeling safer and therefore taking more risks. Similar findings were reported by Sagberg et al (1997) taxis with ABS had significantly shorter headways than taxis without ABS. These kinds of studies show that human responses to technology aren’t always
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Impact of new technologies on mitigations
become more complex and cannot be undertaken during a ‘quick check’. A future approach therefore is to place increasing reliance upon direct digital feedback from within the vehicles. Future systems can expect to have active management of certain error codes to
straightforward.
maintain safety.
However, to take this further beyond this one
A similar approach is being taken by OEM’s to
study on ABS is, in general, a good thing, as
reduce the costs of vehicle recall by shifting
although some advances can have potentially
instead to OTA updates for the controlling
negative or negligible impacts others are very
software to mitigate non-mechanical faults.
positive. For instance passive safety systems
However, such updates still have little clear
such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB)
mandated process raising the potential of both
offer positive improvements in incident reduction
wanted and unwanted risk changes to occur.
Type approval processes help to ensure that new vehicles meet evolving safety regulations ensuring safe engineering practice is followed to the letter of regulations. However, these processes are tested on complete systems in known testing, meaning OEM design ensures minimum requirements are met, and therefore testing may not cover wider test cases beyond those mandated.
but regulation is likely to add in predetermined
ISO26262 provides a framework that advances
process has thus far however only tested 10
this testing with a focus on new vehicle technologies. This approach however still uses scenario testing methodology. It would be unknown what happens with systems beyond those tests performed. This standard looks set to form a strong part of new automation testing
test cases to ensure safer operation of new technologies. NCAP crash safety testing for new vehicles provides a consumer with a visible safety rating for vehicles. Recently this approach has evolved into testing the first level 2 autonomous systems to provide feedback to purchasers on the safety of systems in these new vehicles. Currently this vehicles. Nonetheless, it is clear that NCAP aims to further extend testing into new technologies. As such they have a clear roadmap matching to monitor emerging risks and vital components of safer vehicles. These additional review aspects will, by 2020, encompass: •
Driver Monitoring
•
Automatic Emergency Braking
•
Automatic Emergency Steering
•
Whiplash and rear end impact protection
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Rescue Extrication and Safety
And by 2022: •
Pedestrian and cyclist safety
•
Child presence detection
Although this list is a positive step each will have a series of tests to examine performance and safety ratings. These tests will not be exhaustive Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash
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or provide a complete analysis.
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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
2) Regulatory controls and standards Regulatory controls come in two parts; standards and guidance and regulatory additions. These aim to ensure safety by rules and official guidance to be followed. Over time standards and guidance may shift into direct regulation. Regulatory additions are currently under review globally with early adopters in Germany, UK and central European Union and state by state law in the US. For example, the European Commision has indicated clear changes to type approval which are currently under review. This regulatory change is debating mandating the adoption of various features into the EU’s type approval process. These changes include: •
Automated emergency braking (cars)
•
Alcohol interlock installation facilitation
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Drowsiness and attention detection
•
Distraction recognition / prevention
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Event (accident) data recorder
•
and a whole host of other new mandated issues
As well as these regulatory additions, the US has mandated rear facing camera technology in new vehicles from May 2018, Germany has mandated a third party black box in any vehicle beyond level 2 autonomous to monitor safety and establish fault and the UK has led the way with the most far reaching legal unpinning thus far, in the form of the electric and autonomous vehicles act and the
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for operation. This is the first step in widespread deployment of automation safety features as all new vehicles having raw sensor technology by this date enabling an explosion of widespread new assistive technologies. 3) Vehicle Technology Vehicle technologies are widespread and differentiated between makes and models of vehicles leading to a very complex picture of safety and assistive features. In many cases, Photo by Moss on Unsplash
systems may have a less known impact upon risk yet each mitigates in part some aspects that could
ongoing law commision review.
be a risk factor.
These regulatory changes makes legal autonomous vehicle usage across all roads in the UK and establishes a role for insurers in determining driver vs. manufacturer liability. This, to be implemented correctly, requires further review (ongoing) looking at the data needed across parties to make a sustainable platform for the delivery of this.
For instance, lane keep assist technology
This approach is seen globally as a leading regulatory approach and has recently been tabled for consideration for addition into Canadian law, following the UK’s example.
supports keeping vehicles centrally in clearly marked lanes preventing lane run-off issues. This technology has the potential to offset lane run-off collisions by assisting the driver back into preferred lane positioning. This feature however may leave the driver reliant on cues from steering wheel nudges rather than paying proper attention to lane position. This technology is also dependent upon accurate lane markings and sensor technology to understand its position and as such may not work in all situations, therefore giving drivers a false sense of protection. The
Standards and guidance, although not law, can support safety via self enforcement – these include an OEM industry wide pledge encouraged by US safety regulators NHTSA that OEM’s should all adopt AEB (autonomous emergency braking) by 2022.
positives alone therefore, may not outweigh the
This addition will enforce forward facing (and in the US, rear facing also) sensors into all vehicles
requires a lot of testing to understand how this
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negatives. Technology around fully autonomous vehicles is progressing very quickly, and has the potential to remove the negative human reaction completely. However, to undertake such a huge change technology would perform in the real world.
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Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
This importantly is not just for the risk in the autonomous vehicle but also those around them and how wider behaviour will alter. Specialist test centres, such as the US’s Mcity, or one of the four new autonomous test centres in the UK, have been set up specifically for this reason, to understand how such vehicles will operate in urban and suburban driving environments, but in reality, we still have some way to go before autonomous vehicles become the norm across all our roads.
Infrastructure safety To add further complication, vehicle risks need to be assessed alongside how they operate in a changing environment. Population growth and increased congestion is a problem in many cities, resulting in an increase in active travel and public transport infrastructure provision. In addition, changes in laws tackling emissions means this is taking a much stronger priority in road design and management. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is also facilitating the change from mobility to accessibility and from ownership to usership. MaaS uses a digital interface to source and manage the provision of transport services in order to meet the mobility requirements of customers. The preference platform allows for mobility requirements and choices to be built into the booking or information system. MaaS takes into account real time traffic information to advise on the different options available and informs us about the duration of the journey, the cost,
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its carbon footprint, etc. and users can pre-pay for the service as part of a monthly mobility subscription or just buy on demand routes – payas-you-go. The move towards autonomous vehicles, create obvious opportunities for this market and already in the US, there are areas that have introduced driverless taxis as a pilot for increased learnings and assessment of how these cars will perform on public roads. For example, the Waymo project has an early rider program in Metro, Phoenix, where users can apply to test their self-driving cars and offer feedback and insight into the user experience. Encouragingly, the project has an enviable safety record, however, the complexities
did happen, legally, the ‘driver’ still has to be in control and so again, we have the potential of technology distracting rather than assisting. To help cope with this, in the UK a regulatory review is well underway debating the introduction of a ‘user-in-charge’ into driving law. This facilitates the ‘user-in-charge’ to drop attention from driving, leaving approved autonomous technologies fully in control of mobility.
Behaviour safety It’s clear that one of the biggest factors affecting risk is driver behaviour and how they react and interact with advancing new technologies.
of the infrastructure and laws across different states, coupled with a lack of consistent intelligent road network, makes rolling out across much wider areas very difficult. Inevitably therefore, we are likely to have a hybrid solution for some time yet, with a mix of driver and driverless vehicles on our roads. This in itself, also provides us with new challenges not experienced before. For instance, when driving amongst driverless cars, will drivers become more aggressive in their driving style as they know that these cars will automatically stop? The short-term picture is forecast to include largely increased penetration of vehicles with assistive technologies that will alter risk. Also, in the short to medium term, the potential for more impactful autonomous functionalities can essentially facilitate the ‘driver’ to do something else other than focus on the driving task. However, with all current legislation, if something
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Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash
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Whilst the human driver is not advancing at all, we’re driving several times faster than evolution prepared us to go, and the driver information systems that have emerged to support the driver while driving, do not always result in the positive outcome that was intended.
than any other age group, teens involved in fatal
Distraction is known to be one of the major reasons why drivers are involved in crashes.
One of the major sources of distraction is the
A distraction has been defined as the diversion of attention from activities critical for safe driving toward a competing activity. Proportionally more
crashes are reported to have been distracted at the time of the crash, with distractions as a factor in nearly 6 out of 10 moderate-to-severe crashes (NHTSA, 2016; Beanland, Fitzharris, Young, & LennĂŠ, 2013). use of mobile phone technology whilst driving. With increasingly sophisticated mobile phones, the concern for road safety professionals is that drivers, especially young drivers are not just distracted by holding conversations whilst driving but also texting which is far more dangerous as the mind as well as the eyes are off the road. Talking on a mobile phone when driving can increase your risk of a crash four fold - texting whilst driving can increase your crash risk by up to 23 times. As our dependence on smartphones continues to increase in everyday life, this also impacts on our driving. The impact of the change in how we use mobile phone technology in the vehicle has been shown in a recent study (Carney et al, 2018). The study examined 2,229 naturalistic driving videos involving drivers aged between 16 and 19 yrs. There was a significant increase in the proportion of rear-end crashes with drivers operating/looking at a mobile phone over the years. The videos also revealed that for mobile phone related crashes, a significant shift has occurred, from talking/listening to operating/looking (annual 4.22 % change). The evolution of mobile phones to smartphones means that drivers have now moved
Photo by Alexandre Boucher on Unsplash
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from talking into texting and engagement in
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social media whilst driving. The human driver has therefore also evolved alongside the technology, but not in a desirable direction. By the year 2040 (or perhaps long before) we will be in a new era of mass ‘connected vehicles’ with autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles communicating with road users, the road infrastructure and other vehicles. The continually evolving driving environment is expected to have a commensurate human response but little is known about whether this will have a positive or negative impact on road safety. Road safety professionals are concerned that this hybrid traffic environment may lead to an increase in road traffic casualties in the short to medium term. That’s because the human driver is not evolving appropriate risk reducing behaviour alongside the new technology. Whilst vehicle safety standards are protecting us in the event of a crash, it cannot yet make beyond human decisions that will avoid a crash happening in the first place. There is evidence that collectively road users are adapting to some in-vehicle technology in a negative direction making less safe decisions. Future vehicles and infrastructure are still a long way from protecting us from ourselves. Autonomous technology is already here and can be expected to be increasingly featured in new vehicles - yet drivers have little, if any, understanding of how in vehicle technology and automation impacts levels of risk. Telematic data fortunately allows for a longitudinal analyses of the effects of in-vehicle technology in a naturalistic setting.
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Research should now focus on being able to understand and anticipate human responses to new technology predicting when they might occur and under what conditions. There are particular concerns around young drivers who are more prone to distraction and whilst fully autonomous vehicles target removing human error by taking the human out of the loop, it is clear we will be driving alongside a mixture of manual, semiautonomous and highly autonomous vehicles for some time yet.
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For me personally, the notion of digital disruption doesn’t need to be scary it’s essential! 16
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Driving Actuarial Innovation with Telematics Article written by Andy Goldby
Digital Disruption This buzz phrase has been bandied around insurance industry circles a lot in recent years and let’s face it, it sounds kind of scary. Disruption is a word that might strike fear into the heart of any self-respecting insurance professional because, after all, disruption is often associated with unpredictability and a lack of control which isn’t great when your business is about the prudent management of risk. For me personally, the notion of digital disruption doesn’t need to be scary - it’s essential! In fact as we’ve seen in multiple industries from entertainment to travel, if brands aren’t willing to embrace change and innovation they stand the very real risk of growing less relevant to customers, and could even become obsolete. This is one of the reasons why I am focusing my professional contribution on helping to drive positive disruption and customer-focused innovation into the insurance industry via telematics. Over the past six years at The Floow, I’ve been focusing on how the data and insights that can be derived from telematics can drive increased understanding of an insurer’s notion of risk
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for each insured individual. It’s not just about tracking and scoring a journey. It’s about having a continual focus on honing those scores, training and improving them over time against claims data to create a competitive advantage. It’s also about using those scores to identify new ways of engaging with insured drivers around their behaviour and encouraging them to make positive changes with safety in mind. So how do we do all this at The Floow?
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Better Scores Creating a set of highly predictive scores is not an easy task. We have been honing our scores over several years and continue to do so as we learn more about driver behaviour and consider nuances that might improve their predictability further. Our core set of behavioural and contextual FloowScores sit at the heart of all our products and are built upon literally billions of miles of journey data, gathered from working with clients across five continents and taking data derived from any device (smartphone, OBD, black box etc) to deliver a consistent experience. We capture a variety of data. Firstly, sensor data from the user’s device which looks at GPS location, speed (including acceleration, braking and cornering) and, of course, how often a phone is used and secondly, contextual data which records the roads which are being driven, third party transient data, such as weather, and other external benchmarks. We translate this raw data into KPIs for every journey that can relate to the drivers chance of having an accident. For
Similarly, in terms of contextual data, we have developed an understanding of the unique attributes of individual roads, analysing data in context of other external factors such as how other people are driving, road layouts and pedestrian crossings. Through various machine learning techniques our data scientists then analyse and score against the six key components of our algorithm, which include speed, distraction, smoothness of driving, time of day, fatigue and the risk posed by the specific roads driven on. By blending a set of behavioural scores as well as contextual scores, we’ve developed a scoring platform that is proven to challenge the traditional proxy-based model which assess risk for an insurance policy. Our data gathered via client deployments over the past six years suggests that not only do telematics portfolios deliver a 25% improvement in burn cost but our scores deliver a predictive power creating up to a 10x difference in the likely claims frequency between drivers achieving a low score of <30 and a great score of over 80.
example, we know that though distraction can
Using this telematics scoring system alongside
be caused by many factors, perhaps the most
traditional rating factors (customer factors, vehicle
significant is using a mobile phone. We’ve found
factors and policy factors) can add significant
a clear relationship between having a high
value to the combined model’s predictive power,
distraction score and your propensity to claim,
in fact adding 5-10x the additional impact that
and our scores relate to the time spent on a call
adding credit score did.
as well as handling a phone whilst driving. Our data shows that a more distracted driver is twice as likely to have an accident than someone who does not use their phone whilst driving.
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Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve found a clear relationship between having a high distraction score and your propensity to claim, and our scores relate to the time spent on a call as well as handling a phone whilst driving.
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Better Insights A strongly predictive set of scores allow our clients to differentiate between the risk presented by their telematics and non telematics book. Whilst this is a demanding task, the data derived from telematics provides actuaries with powerful new capabilities to price their policies and inform their understanding of risk. Traditional factors associated with age, postcode, profession and claims history are no longer the only indicators. Telematics changes that by introducing a new set of policy-holder scores based upon an understanding of the true picture of their driving behaviour. At The Floow, evidence suggests customers are reporting 15% fewer claims on the telematics
book than would be expected on the same mix of non-telematics policies with the average claims cost being 10% lower as well, 20%+ increased retention and up to 4x improved conversion as well as the ability to sell safely into otherwise riskier segments. If these benefits weren’t enough, telematics data enables the opportunity to do two things: 1. Create attractive retention pricing strategies for the best risk (after all, keeping a customer is far less costly than attracting a new one) 2. Develop new strategies to engage those whose driving behaviour could use some improvement We have a number of tried and tested approaches for engaging drivers to help them focus on driving improvements. Of course, sharing scores and tips within an app is one way we do this, but we’ve found that integrating rewards programmes have a better long term impact. Our rewards and incentive schemes are proven to improve driver scores by as much as 54% over a 1000 mile period, and have a bigger behavioural impact than just offering an insurance discount at the end of the year – especially for low-scoring drivers. We work with insurance companies to understand exactly what behavioural outcomes they are looking to achieve before recommending a rewards solution that’s both tailored to their customer demographics and easy to redeem. Where rewards alone are not enough to improve behaviour we can assign the driver into our
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FloowCoach programme, where we use social
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science techniques with the aim to help improve driver behaviour. FloowCoach is pioneering in its approach, targeting drivers with the lowest scores and riskiest driving behaviour and inviting them to participate in a 12-week programme
train the scores against their own claims data, they report a significant boost of up to three times the profitability per telematics customer versus their traditional policy types, and a set of scores that represent powerful and unique new IP.
of telephone-based conversations with highly trained behavioural coaches. The Floow has now assisted more than 1300 drivers with FloowCoach. Through a series of phone conversations, we help drivers to focus on specific ways to improve their overall score and drive more safely. Our latest research shows that for every 100 people in the lowest-scoring decile who have completed the FloowCoach programme, 13 accidents are avoided compared to standard feedback mechanisms. Based on the correlation between scores and claims frequency, we project an overall 18% reduction in claims compared with the control group. This means that for every 1,000 drivers participating in the programme, we are preventing 31 accidents from taking place.
Better Partnerships Long-term and highly invested relationships deliver our clients a better partnership. Our longest standing client has been with us from the very beginning, benefiting, as our more recent clients do, from the opportunity to train their scores upon the solid baseline of our core scoring platform. The resulting scores become the unique IP of our clients - an approach that we consider to be unique in the market and critical to our clientsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; development of true differentiation. When client actuaries and underwriters work with us to further
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Better Outcomes Outcomes relating to positive improvements in road safety and fewer accidents are beneficial to all, but for an insurer’s business there is of course a cost associated with developing telematics programmes, which has to be worth the investment. We have developed a thorough set of cost benefit analyses to demonstrate how our propositions can deliver long-term client value. For example, our UK cost benefit analysis shows that the profit per policy of a telematics policy can be 3x more than a standard insurance book, even after taking into account the cost of building the programme and technical costs. This is because of the selection benefit, fraud reduction and
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behavioural improvements (via coaching, rewards etc) that can be delivered with telematics policies. Additional benefits can be achieved with the introduction of accident identification and FNOL services, enabling very rapid assistance to be given to drivers involved in serious accidents. In addition to these benefits, telematics offers the ability to tackle fraudulent claims, which cost the industry many billions every year. My view is that telematics offers some very useful indicators to help insurers identify dishonest drivers. As an industry we will never be able to completely prevent fraud but understanding potentially fraudulent behaviour before it impacts the bottom line will help improve the likelihood of being able to prevent the damage it could cause. We have created indices that help to detect how honestly drivers are using our telematics apps: the patterns of how they tag completed journeys and a measure of the continuousness of the journeys tagged as the policy-holder driving (they may appear to have missing journeys or appear to be tagging their worst journeys as if they were a passenger). Additionally, we can create indices relating to the integrity of their declarations relating to the mileage total completed in the insurance year, the ‘risk address’ where the vehicle is really kept and parked overnight, or the class of use of the vehicle (spotting commuters, taxis and couriers etc). With these we are able to identify discrepancies which help to identify dishonesty within the first week or two of the policy enabling the insurer to make an informed decision as to how to treat these customers before their “cooling-off” period is over.
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I believe that telematics presents a positive disruption that introduces a new paradigm of fairness into motor insurance pricing. Many senior decision-makers in the industry agree. In a YouGov survey we recently conducted amongst decision makers from international insurance companies, the widespread adoption of telematics is now seen to be dominant in shaping the future of car insurance. When asked how the
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In Summary
motor insurance industry would change over the next decade, all the top five factors mentioned relate directly to the application of telematics. It’s our belief that telematics will be critical to the evolution of the mobility and insurance industries. Its applications are many, but what is clear is its insights will be a powerful contributor making mobility safer, and insurance fairer as well as more profitable. If you’d like to find out more about The Floow’s approach to scoring, please contact me via info@thefloow.com
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Photography by Julia Claxton, 2016
One of the objectives of the MOVE_UK project is to reach an enhanced understanding of behaviour from richer and more comprehensive mobility data than is generally available.
Working Towards the Future of Mobility Through Our Involvement in UK and European Research and Development Projects Article written by Dr Sam Chapman
project sees a series of Jaguar Land Rover trail vehicles driving to, from and around the test area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Each vehicle has a multitude of monitoring equipment inside it which records driving miles so journey data from within the vehicle systems, new sensors and controls can be analysed to inform insights and analysis. Why is the project important?
At The Floow, research and development is one of the most important things that we do. It plays a vital role in influencing our product development and it allows us to focus further on the future of mobility through helping our clients to prepare for the changes being brought about by new technologies, business models and legislative requirements.
One of the objectives of the MOVE_UK project
We are currently working on a number of R&D projects to understand, inform and improve our product offering and mobility in general. You can find out more about these projects below:
In other words, existing telematics is used to seek new ways to distinguish journeys that appear very similar, but which actually present divergent levels of risk when viewed from the perspective of additional data.
MOVE_UK
is to reach an enhanced understanding of behaviour from richer and more comprehensive mobility data than is generally available. The aim of risk estimation research is to identify new behaviour clusters and factors that can aid the understanding of the likelihood and outcomes of incidents or real risk scenarios.
MOVE_UK is a project part-funded by the UK Governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CCAV department, which brings together six world leading organisations - Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, TRL, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Direct Line Group and The Floow - to reduce the timescale and cost of autonomous vehicles through live trials in real-world environments. The three year project began in August 2016 and it is set to conclude in July 2019 with the third and final phase of the project currently underway. The
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Photography by Julia Claxton, 2016
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The project’s influence on our product development The MOVE_UK project allows The Floow to understand not only future technologies but also how we can test and refine our current cutting edge scoring for the benefit of our clients and drivers in general. Ultimately, we see the telematics aspect of MOVE_UK as the most important for future development as the insights help us to better understand driver risk helping to strengthen our understanding of risk for those we work with (such as insurers, fleet managers and auto manufacturers). The driver behaviour insights we have gathered, in this project and beyond, are beneficial for many including:
Photography by Julia Claxton, 2016
What is The Floow’s involvement in MOVE_UK? The Floow’s involvement surrounds the telematics aspect of the project and the analysis of data in order to understand the risks associated with autonomous vehicles. For the MOVE_UK project, we investigate data values to understand consistency, reliability and how potential future telematics products can be enhanced with connected car data.
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•
insurers - helping them to price policies more accurately
•
car makers - helping them to develop safer cars
•
governments and local authorities helping them to design road systems and make changes which will improve road safety whilst also helping them deal with the challenges of autonomy
To find out more about our involvement in MOVE_ UK, you can visit the MOVE_UK website [https://www.move-uk.com/] or check out The Floow’s blog [https://www.thefloow.com/blog/ move-uk-phase-two-report.html]
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SETA
Working on the project has been a consortium
Over the last two and a half years, The Floow has been part of a consortium of organisations working on a SETA project to create technologies and methodologies in order to change the way mobility is monitored, understood and managed in large metropolitan areas.
Sheffield universities, Birmingham City Council,
of 15 partners from five countries, including both Knowledge Now Limited (all UK), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), 5T Torino (Italy) and Aimsum (Spain), with the project work focused across three cities in Europe: Santander in Spain, Turin in Italy and Birmingham in the UK. Why is the project important? The aim of the SETA project is to create technologies and methodologies to change the way mobility is monitored, understood and managed in large metropolitan areas to help relevant organisations effectively plan for the future of mobility and transport in their local area and make changes which will benefit drivers, mobility and road safety. What is The Floowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s involvement in SETA? The Floow has been involved in the Birmingham arm of the project, working across a 25km area spanning from the city centre to the airport, to understand urban environments and transport patterns in further detail. These insights will help us inform the cities of the future by making them safer, smarter and greener.
Birmingham, UK
The three year project started in 2016 and it is due to finish in the first half of 2019. As the project is near completion, I attended a conference in Milan at the end of last year to report on our work to date to decide how these findings can be used to inform future decision-making surrounding mobility and transport.
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Over the course of the SETA project, we have been collecting and making use of anonymised data taken from a number of sources including smartphones, OBDs, in-car electronics, traffic lights and road and pollution sensors to gain a fully rounded picture of traffic, transport and mobility in the city of Birmingham. By collecting and collating anonymised data from
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such a wide array of sources, it not only allows us to gain a clear picture of traffic behaviours it also allows us to replace ‘clipboard studies’ that rely upon manual collection. These traditional techniques, still widely in use, are seen to be inefficient, costly and lacking in detailed data for making informed decisions regarding the future of transport and mobility in an urban environment. The project’s influence on our product development The move from manual methods towards more wide scale and evidence-led approaches using ‘virtual-sensor’ data allows us to understand behaviours evident on every individual stretch of road which previously would be impractical to try to measure. This granularity of data provides us with useful
Image: Average speeds around Birmingham centre during morning rush hour
insights into how traffic moves throughout cities, from main roads to junctions, to understand road usage patterns. These insights enable the discovery of simple and cost-effective changes which can be implemented by councils and local authorities to have a beneficial impact on efficiency and road safety for all road users. This has informed our product development and what we offer to our insurance clients by allowing us to gain improved understanding of different perspectives of mobility. It has also fed into our conversations with UK central government in meetings with various departments where our evidence and insight has been useful to help inform approaches to transport and infrastructure for the future.
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It also influenced the creation of our DataFloow solution which takes our anonymised mass market data collected from vehicles and mobile sensors allowing us to see a unique picture of road and transport patterns. The opportunity to observe driving behaviours provides us with strong insights and important information to help with traffic modelling, traffic management, long term strategic planning and the optimisation of mobility. To find out more about our involvement in SETA, you can visit the SETA website [https://www.thefloow.com/blog/the-floow-setainform-future-mobility.html] or check out The Floow’s blog [http://setamobility.weebly.com/]
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31 Photo by Reuben Hustler on Unsplash
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Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
UPLIFT UPLIFT is a 21 month project, which starts in February 2019, to strengthen the UK’s position in the motor insurance sector building upon our telematics capability. UPLIFT seeks to empower improved and fairer insurance products to make mobility smarter and safer for all. The UPLIFT project is being funded by the Industrial Challenge Strategy Fund and takes place across the UK to enhance the insurance industry through telematics by working to ensure fairness and a lack of bias when telematics is used for insurance purposes by ensuring the use of ethics and data transparency throughout the process. Why is the project important? UPLIFT has been designed to research new telematics enhancements to target strategic improvements in: •
Fairer risk estimation - to enable improved and fairer pricing
•
Fairer fraud estimation - to add
Photo by Gijs Coolen on Unsplash
new aspects into support of fairer processing •
Enhanced driver feedback - to lower risk and improve care of the policyholder to strengthen insurerpolicyholder relationship
The project’s goal is to grow new fine grained understanding of risk directly from telematics minimising the usage of traditional insurance risk criteria which are less easy to justify and
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potentially unfair to policyholders. It also aims to enable fairer, personalised and easier to understand insurance products for drivers. What is The Floow’s involvement with UPLIFT? The Floow is driving this project forward by working with an interdisciplinary group of experts from different backgrounds including data science, driver psychology and behaviour and insurance risk estimation.
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Photo by David Emrich on Unsplash
The group are working together to ensure the project targets areas including: •
Bias identification and reduction
•
Increased transparency and feedback to policyholders
•
Improved protection of privacy for policyholders
•
Strong ethical data handling
The project’s influence on our product development UPLIFT allows us to focus on better driver understanding to improve and refine key components of our scoring algorithm. This will not only have a positive impact on our product growth but it will benefit our clients (insurers) and their customers (policyholders) by allowing them to better understand their driving behaviour through their journey scores and driver feedback. To find out more about the UPLIFT project, visit The Floow’s website [https://www.thefloow.com/ news/floow-appointed-to-lead-new-drive-on-roadsafety.html]
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ACUTE The Floow has recently started work on a new project, called ACUTE, which aims to Address Congestion Using Telematics Evidence. The ACUTE project, which started in January 2019, is being funded by the Department for Transport (DfT) and will focus around the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Why is the project important? Congestion is a major problem in many cities across the world for a number of reasons including contributing to increases in pollution and travel time as well as decreasing the efficiency of the road network. This project is exploring how congestion can be reduced in differing ways. The project is proposing a scalable solution which involves the reuse of anonymised journey telematics data from vehicles to gain a better picture of mass mobility including congestion across the road network. The aim of this analysis is to build an evidence base in order to identify the root causes of congestion so appropriate prioritisations, mitigations and interventions can be applied in the case study area of Greenwich. What is The Floow’s involvement with ACUTE? The Floow is drawing on analytical experience of understanding fine grained data and large scale vehicle behaviour data. This project allows us to build a detailed statistical picture across all parts of the road network highlighting where vehicles
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go and how they behave on the roads, every hour of the week. Further analysis will focus on understanding what road conditions are normal for an area to understand the characteristics which lead to congestion, ballooning pollution levels and greater safety risks in vehicular environments. The results of this analysis will provide us with detailed evidence on areas of road congestion including frequency, severity and causation. The project’s influence on our product development We believe the ACUTE project will have a big impact on understanding congestion and we hope it will be the catalyst for further research into this area. For The Floow, we hope to be able to gain beneficial insights into congestion and to further our already strong knowledge of driver behaviour through telematics systems. To find out more about our involvement in the ACUTE project, check out The Floow’s blog [https://www.thefloow.com/blog/acute-floowcongestion-telematics.html]
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Vehicle congestion outside Birmingham Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hospital
WM-Air The Floow has recently joined the West Midlands Air Quality Improvement Programme (WM-Air) which is being coordinated by the University of Birmingham in order to support the improvement of air quality and associated health, economic and environmental benefits in the West Midlands. The project, which started in 2014, runs until 2023, to look at the long-term effects of pollution across many areas of the West Midlands. A study of this length has never been conducted in the UK before and the amount of data that will be processed over this time period will form an evidence base to inform policies in government departments including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department for Transport (DfT) to lower pollution levels in cities across the UK. Why is the project important? The aim of this project is to look longitudinally at pollution in the West Midlands area from 2014 through to 2023 to see how pollution is changing based on evolving vehicle technologies and changing driver behaviours. The project will also assess a number of initiatives which aim to reduce pollution to see which ones are working so that they can, if deemed successful, be rolled out on a wider scale. What is The Floowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s involvement in WM-Air? The Floow is involved in one part of this wideranging project and we will look at vehicle pollution and emissions from the tailpipe as well as the wear of brakes and tyres. We will be
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using understandings of mass anonymised driver behaviour on particular sectors of road to better understand pollution and driver behaviour trends in the West Midlands region. By analysing this data, it will allow us to see where driving behaviours alter as a result of the launch and implementation of measures and initiatives which are aimed at reducing pollution, as well as understanding the impact these measures are having on pollution outputs in the area. One such intervention are Clean Air Zones and one of which has been introduced in Birmingham recently. The zone sees polluting vehicles being charged for travelling through Birmingham city centre in an attempt to reduce the high levels of pollution in this area. Many cities across the UK, including Leeds and Portsmouth, are also being encouraged to implement this initiative by 2020 in order to reduce the high levels of pollution found in multiple city centres around the country. The project’s influence on our product development The Floow has over six years experience analysing telematics data and working on a number of future-focused projects including some aimed at reducing pollution. As a result, we know that aggressive driving behaviours, such as harsh braking and acceleration, are not only dangerous but they emit much higher levels of pollution than driving more smoothly. Our unique knowledge in this area allows us
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Vehicle pollution and emissions from the tailpipe
to make informed recommendations which will not only have a positive impact on the levels of pollution in a specific area but it will also help to curb dangerous braking and declaration events which impact on a drivers’ risk profile and the amount of risk on an insurer’s book. As a result, the work we are doing on research and development projects such as WM-Air is not only having a positive impact on cities to make them cleaner and greener but it is also making them safer and smarter benefitting insurers, local authorities and all road users. To find out more about the WM-Air project, you can visit the University of Birmingham’s website [https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/gees/ research/projects/wm-air/index.aspx].
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Photo by Victor Xok on Unsplash
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Working with The Floow has been extremely insightful and we are delighted to have reached such a monumental milestone of scoring two billion miles. At Direct Line Group, we embrace partnerships like these as it gives us an opportunity to work with new, innovative and forward-thinking businesses.â&#x20AC;? Annette Fox, Head of Telematics at Direct Line Group.
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How Long-Term Partnerships Can Deliver Significant Benefits to Insurers and Their Policyholders Article written by Claire Sargeant
During our six year partnership with Direct Line Group, we’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to work closely with them to develop telematics propositions which truly add value from encouraging better and safer behaviours on the road to saving young drivers more than £50 million in premiums since the launch of their first proposition in June 2013. Alongside this huge financial milestone, the UK’s largest personal motor insurer is also celebrating reaching two billion driver miles recorded with The Floow. We work with Direct Line Group across a number of their brands, including Direct Line, Churchill and Privilege, to deliver telematics solutions which complement and enhance the general motor insurance products they offer across the UK.
Developing Scoring IP Over the last five years, we have collected journey and driver behavioural data for Direct Line Group, scoring drivers across six key areas - comparative speed, smooth driving, road risk, fatigue, mobile distraction and time of day - to produce individual component, journey and driver
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scores using our world-class scoring algorithm providing them with a better understanding of their policyholders’ risk. To add further value to their telematics insurance propositions, we have worked with Direct Line Group to add their claims data into our scoring algorithm to build their own unique scoring IP. This gives them greater predictability of claims propensity and the opportunity to price motor insurance policies with much greater accuracy, benefiting not only them but their customers who reap the reward of having access to fairer priced premiums modelled on their driving behaviour. All of this results in drivers gaining an overview of their individual driving style by providing them with the insights which can help them to make positive improvements to their behaviour and become safer and smarter on the road. Annette Fox, Head of Telematics at Direct Line Group, recently made the following comment about our partnership; “We know that through data we will have a much better understanding of risk which will not only enable us to offer better premiums to young drivers, but we can help educate, inform and improve road safety overall. It is Direct Line Group’s ambition to be a leading telematics insurance provider and we are confident that working with The Floow, we can help drive change that will see telematics fully integrated within the UK motor market”.
Driver Coaching Motorists who receive consistently good scores over time can benefit from lower insurance premiums whereas those drivers who have the
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lowest scores are invited to take part in our driver
Improve customer loyalty to the
coaching programme, FloowCoach, which has
brand, through great customer
been designed to help motorists to improve their
experience
driving skills through a series of telephone-based coaching conversations. FloowCoach was created by The Floow’s Chief Education Officer and Associate Professor of Driver Behaviour at Cranfield University, Dr Lisa Dorn, to help reduce the number of accidents and deaths on the roads. Our trained behavioural coaches work with drivers in the bottom 10-20%, as they are proven to represent an increased risk of making a claim
•
Support Direct Line Group’s CSR agenda aligning to young driver safety and saving lives
Direct Line Group sees FloowCoach as an opportunity to actively engage low scoring drivers, who are likely to regularly exhibit behaviours such as speeding, braking harshly and distraction which have a negative impact on road safety but they are also the areas where drivers have the most influence over improving their
during the lifetime of the policy, to help them
driving to become safer drivers.
develop safer driving behaviours through the
Our latest research shows that FloowCoach has
use of behavioural change techniques over the course of the 12-week programme.
encouraged an improvement in graduates in the lowest deciles scores by up to 30%, with an
During these coaching sessions, a series of goals
average close to 15%.
are agreed upon and progress against each
Customer Engagement and Retention
of them is measured and discussed alongside support and encouragement offered by our coaches. Follow up contact is also made with FloowCoach graduates after three months which serves to ‘nudge’ drivers towards maintaining behavioural changes and improved scores. FloowCoach was first launched to Direct Line Group customers in October 2015 on their DrivePlus brand before being extended to their other brands in 2017. With FloowCoach, we worked with the Group to: •
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•
The inclusion of additional features into telematics insurance propositions not only encourages safer driving reducing the number of claims on an insurers book to save them money and allow them to offer cheaper premiums but it also helps encourage customer retention through engagement techniques and a focus on building a strong relationship between insurer and policyholder. In a world full of choice for the consumer, it has never been more important for an organisation
Help their policyholders understand
to be truly customer centric. It is also vital that
and engage with their driving
legacy industries, such as insurance and finance,
behaviour
focus on the customer by creating products and
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An Enduring Partnership As consumers continue to demand choice and quality from every organisation they interact with, it is vital that insurance companies remain customer-focused in order to remain competitive in a fast-changing market, increasingly dominated by technological advancements. Therefore having a service provider behind your organisation that you can trust to deliver a quality service for you and your customers is extremely important and its why The Floow is so committed to delivering an excellent service and quality products to their clients and across the whole insurance market. We are extremely proud of everything we have achieved through our partnership with Direct Line Group over the last six years and we are looking forward to many more years working with them to deliver solutions which enhance the insurance experience, deliver customer engagement and improve road safety across the UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roads. Our Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, Dr Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Sam Chapman, summed it up best in a recent article celebrating the two billion miles milestone [https://www.thefloow.com/news/dlg-and-the-
services which meet customer requirements.
floow-2-billion-miles.html];
The Floow recognises this and helps insurers,
â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved
including Direct Line Group, to build relationships
by working with Direct Line Group; their reach has
with their policyholders by creating engaging
enabled us to bring telematics benefits to a wide
insurance propositions through the use of
audience across the UK. The partnership means
telematics technology, driver feedback and
there are more people using telematics who want
rewards programmes which encourage
to be better drivers and who could benefit from
engagement and long-term improvements to
lower premiums and a safer environment on the
driver behaviour.
roads.â&#x20AC;?
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Spotlight on…
Data Science Article written by Charlotte Pearson
The Floow’s Data Science team is made up of 11 highly skilled data scientists whose expertise in maths, physics and computer sciences has seen them achieve academically up to PhD level and apply their skills across a number of industries and use cases including healthcare consultancies, clinical trials and geophysics. The Data Science team looks after the heart of our telematics solution responsible for data analysis, which produces our world-class scoring algorithms. We spoke to Douglas Tsui, Data Scientist, and Neil Shephard, Senior Data Scientist, to find out more about what they do, how they support our clients and what makes a good data scientist at The Floow.
What they do The Floow’s Data Science team are an important part of our telematics solutions spending most of their time studying and working with the telematics data that is collected from a number of devices on behalf of our clients and via their insurance propositions. Their role within The Floow often requires them to work with a number of teams including Research & Development, Android and iOS mobile
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Some projects that our Data Science team are currently working on include: Working with one of our clients and using their telematics data to better understand where drivers park their cars overnight (compared to where the driver tells the insurer they intend to park it) Improving our Smooth Driving score to give more context around the score by taking into account areas such as road type and time of day when scoring the smoothness of driving Improve our journey tagging to better identify journeys where you are a passenger or a driver
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
development, Platform, QA and our Business Analysts on client projects, product development and innovation activities.
Revising our Fatigue score to take into account the different types of fatigue - active where you pay a lot of attention to the road such as in urban areas and passive which includes long, monotonous and repetitive journeys, such as motorway journeys.
How they support our clients
This cross-team collaboration allows our data scientists to develop scores and algorithms which meet the needs of the business, the market and our clients as well as ensuring that they have sufficient amounts of data to work with and that their algorithms can scale in production through rigorous testing from our QA team before launch.
The Data Science team support our clients in a number of ways including overseeing client projects from the gathering of client requirements through to delivery, being the first contact point with knowledge of our scoring capabilities and facilitating meetings with experts across The Floow as and when required.
Typically, they spend their days developing new scores, performing claims regression to provide score predictivity and developing algorithms that can be used for product development activities such as crash detection and driver/passenger tagging.
They keep clients informed of project progress, answer service queries, craft proposals and help to produce internal documentation such as product sheets, particularly with regards to our scoring capabilities.
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Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash
By keeping in regular contact with our clients, they can help to represent the client internally through project prioritisations and by liaising with their technical colleagues to deal with issues as and when they occur in a quick and efficient manner. They work dynamically, regularly rotating projects so everyone has the opportunity to be involved in different aspects of the work ensuring knowledge is shared across the team. They also regularly update everyone in the team and across the company, as well as our clients, on projects and their progress through weekly catch up calls, slide decks and conference calls as well as working in a bespoke way which requires regular feedback of progress and refinement. However, the ultimate aim for our Data Science team is to better identify risk which is why they work so closely with our insurance clients to enable them to have a better view of the risk their policyholders represent based on the unique insights our scoring algorithm provides. These insights can be improved by training client scores against claims data providing the client with their own scoring IP which can optimally predict claims propensity and severity. This unique approach delivers three times the profitability per telematics customer versus traditional policy types. To work in even closer collaboration with some of our clients, the team have created entirely separate data science teams to protect and ringfence the IP that they are learning and developing for that particular client. All of this
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allows our clients to utilise our data science expertise in a way that will benefit them and their policyholders the most.
Why they love working at The Floow Speaking with Neil and Douglas, they mentioned a number of things that they particularly liked about working at The Floow including
the dynamic environment, the learning and development opportunities they receive in working with clients and the opportunity to learn new programming languages and software engineering. They also spoke about how every day at The Floow is new and challenging allowing staff to utilise their skills and develop new ones. Neil spoke about the The Floow’s team and culture as the things he loves the most, saying:“It’s the people. It’s a friendly environment.” For Douglas, it was the opportunity to learn and be supported on that journey; “Joining The Floow was a step up and it allowed me to learn new languages as well as learning how to use Linux and GIT. What was most appealing, when I applied for this role, was that The Floow had managed to create their own telematics solution.”
What does it take to make a good data scientist at The Floow? To be a good data scientist at The Floow, you need to have an analytical mind to break problems down. It also helps to be inquisitive and a good team player as they rely on each other a lot, feeding off each other’s strengths in order to create the best work they can. They may be the skills we ask for on the job description but as Neil and Douglas mentioned, it also helps if you have a good sense of humour and some capability on the ping pong table!
Photo by Hack Capital on Unsplash
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To find out more about our data science capabilities please contact us at info@thefloow.com.
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Photo by Andreas Kind on Unsplash
The Floow’s Vision and Strategic Direction Article written by Aldo Monteforte
“Insurance is the business of placing risk where it belongs.” As The Floow transitions into the next stage of its growth, I think it is important to reflect on what we have achieved in the last seven years, how important our work is becoming to the future of mobility, and where we go from here. Quite often as companies grow and develop, the reason that they started and the vision of what they hope to achieve can get lost. However, with The Floow, I am lucky to say that has not been the case and we remain focused on our mission and the values which have always driven us. That said, I still think it’s vital to take the time to remain conscious of our future direction to ensure we remain on the right path. At The Floow, we are inspired by the mission of achieving safer and smarter mobility by partnering with organisations in the auto insurance industry. These partnerships see The Floow act as a ‘refinery’ for data collected through any device, including smartphone, OBDs and black boxes. In the same way that an oil refinery receives crude oil and processes it to generate a range of derivative products - such as gasoline, lubricants etc. - The Floow processes and transforms raw mobility data into driver scores, analytics and
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These trends have combined with a powerful force to alter the present landscape at an accelerating speed. In the new world heralded by these changes, an insurer’s core business - the profitable assumption and management of risk - requires (a) a deep understanding of the technologies that underpin mobility and (b) mastering of mobile-first, digital engagement with their end users. The Floow’s product roadmap is designed to enable our insurance and mobility partners to take advantage of these transformational trends. Some of our key developments here include the following: Photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash
a variety of services for the benefit of motor insurance professionals and their policyholders.
Mobile first
Within this ‘refinery’ framework, The Floow’s strategic direction has been shaped by key transformative trends that are affecting the auto insurance industry, such as:
as-a-sensor technology throughout our product
•
•
• •
The extraordinary proliferation of affordable, powerful connected and
To maintain our leadership with smartphonerange, we are focusing on offering both a standalone option as well as an option presented in conjunction with peripherals such as tags, OBDs and cameras. These solutions can augment smartphone efficacy, whilst maintaining the
data-producing sensors embedded in many objects of daily life, smartphones being the chief example
smartphone’s leading role in the architecture.
Pervasive connectivity of new vehicles, provided as part of the original equipment
their ability to provide high quality mobility data
The transition towards increasing vehicle autonomy Changes in vehicle ownership models
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Smartphones are the protagonist due to (a) their nature as primary interfaces for end users and (b) at low cost. However, the efficacy of smartphones can be augmented by introducing IoT capabilities such as wireless peripherals, including tags and cameras, that can mitigate some of the limitations which are intrinsic to the nomadic nature of the smartphone.
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Risk model sophistication Enabling our insurance partners to build a unique competitive advantage with superior understanding of risk is made possible by our behavioural scoring and pricing as well as the creation of proprietary scores through self-service and automated tools on The Floowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s platform. This gradually enables our insurance partners to eliminate the need for traditional rating proxies by helping them to generate accurate premiums directly from the behavioural data collected from mobility sensors and onboard devices. This will power the provision of â&#x20AC;&#x153;No-Questions-Askedâ&#x20AC;? policies.
Our aim is to remove all friction from the customer experience in order to make safe mobility easier for the driver.
The Floow is currently engaged in Research and Development programmes which help us to offer unique access to a new generation of risk models to our insurance partners which are designed to predict claim propensity of Level 3 (and above) vehicles on the autonomous vehicle technology scale.
Data science Building on our existing AI and machine learning techniques, we can provide advanced contextual analysis resulting in enhanced driver-passenger recognition, greater accuracy of auto-tagging as well as crash detection and loss estimation.
User engagement and behavioural modifications The Floow can deliver added value to insurance propositions through positive behavioural improvement techniques including rewards,
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Photo by Alex Suprun on Unsplash
coaching and in-app feedback delivered to policyholders. For our commercial lines insurance clients, the opportunity to provide their fleet customers with fleet management tools can also help to encourage positive improvements to driver behaviour. Our aim is to remove all friction from the customer experience in order to make safe mobility easier for the driver. One way to do this would be to expand the reach of our successful FloowCoach driver coaching programme through the integration of chatbot technology into our current offering.
Touch-less claims We have automated our crash detection capabilities, on both server and the smartphone side - all integrated through our insurer portal - allowing us to support FNOL, accident reconstruction and roadside assistance. Our ambition is to integrate across more stages of the claims lifecycle, beyond crash detection, in pursuit of the holy grail of â&#x20AC;&#x153;touch-less claimsâ&#x20AC;?, to reduce expenses and delight end users with near instantaneous cycle time.
Collaboration with OEMs We will look to expand our existing partnerships with major OEMs such as Nissan, Renault, PSA and BMW as well as establish new partnerships to enable the collection of data from OEM platforms.
Mobility services The advent of the sharing economy is resulting in changes in perceptions towards vehicle usage and ownership. This presents new challenges
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Additionally, we provide them with the opportunity to build unique and proprietary scoring IP through our scoring service, FloowScore. By making use of our FloowCoach programme, insurers can address the riskiest segments of their book with proven techniques that materially improve scores by making drivers safer. However, as the auto space is shaped by the advent of more natively connected and potentially intelligent vehicles, our understanding of risk, which is so crucial to the profitable running of insurance, requires integration with OEMs as Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
to insurers, alongside opportunities to take advantage of this market transition with an active role in promoting of P2P car sharing services (via our GoWithFloow platform).
well as developing risk models which understand the claims propensity when partial autonomy is enabled. The Floowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Research and Development work is, and will continue, to be at the forefront of this evolution in the future of mobility.
How our strategy will impact our insurance partners
In conclusion
Our strategy is designed to serve insurance partners in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s auto insurance environment as well as helping them in the longer term.
on producing the best predictive analytics for
For example, in the short term, insurers can go to market almost instantly with a complete smartphone-as-a-sensor solution, including rewards, by making use of our FloowDrive solution. For our commercial insurance partners, it is just as easy for them to get up and running with a complete insurance telematics solution for their fleet customers with our FloowFleet solution which allows fleet managers to better manage risk, keep track of assets and monitor driver behaviour.
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The Floow will remain passionately focused insurers worldwide and enriching the experience of the policyholders to the point of mass market adoption. In the process, we intend to reinforce The Floow as the best place to work for people who are hungry to harness the power of sensors, software and data in the quest to make mobility safer and smarter for everyone. We look forward to continuing to equip the global insurance industry with indispensable technology that protects human life and promotes all forms of smart mobility.
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The Floow Ltd, The Floow Campus, Wicker Lane, Sheffield, S3 8HQ +44 (0) 114 270 1114 info@thefloow.com www.thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow
