The Floow's Vision and Strategic Direction

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, OBD’s 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 a variety of services for the benefit of motor insurance professionals and their policyholders.

Photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash

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:

• The extraordinary proliferation of affordable, powerful connected and data-producing sensors embedded in many objects of daily life, smartphones being the chief example

• Pervasive connectivity of new vehicles, provided as part of the original equipment

• The transition towards increasing vehicle autonomy

• Changes in vehicle ownership models

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:

Mobile first

To maintain our leadership with smartphone-as-a-sensor technology throughout our product range, 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 smartphone’s leading role in the architecture.

Smartphones are the protagonist due to (a) their nature as primary interfaces for end users and (b) their ability to provide high quality mobility data 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.

Risk model sophistication

Enabling our insurance partners to build a unique competitive advantage with superior understanding of risk is made possible by our behavioral scoring and pricing as well as the creation of proprietary scores through self-service and automated tools on The Floow’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 behavioral data collected from mobility sensors and onboard devices. This will power the provision of “No-Questions-Asked” policies.

The Floow is currently engaged in Research andDevelopment programs 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 behavioral modifications

The Floow can deliver added value to insurance propositions through positive behavioral improvement techniques including rewards, coaching and in-app feedback delivered to policyholders. For our commercial lines insurance partners, the opportunity to provide their fleet customers with fleet management tools can also help to encourage positive improvements to driver behavior.

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 program 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 “touch-less claims”, 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 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).

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

How our strategy will impact our insurance partners

Our strategy is designed to serve insurance partners in today’s auto insurance environment as well as helping them in the longer term.

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 behavior.

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 program, 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 well as developing risk models which understand the claims propensity when partial autonomy is enabled.

The Floow’s Research and Development work is, and will continue, to be at the forefront of this evolution in the future of mobility.

In conclusion

The Floow will remain passionately focused on producing the best predictive analytics for insurers worldwide and enriching the experience of 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.