20 million miles and counting

When you’re a fast growth company, it’s easy to let milestones pass by as you move on to the next urgent thing. But, milestones are important to recognise and celebrate with the team and customer, and it’s also a great time to reflect.

Since taking on our first motor insurance customer, we’ve achieved a lot and this month we reached a major milestone – surpassing 20 million miles of driving data analysed through our platform.

However, for us the volume of data is not the most important thing, it’s the quality and relevance of the data to the industry, as well as the useful lessons learned along the way.

As a startup with no legacy, we have the benefit of rapidly using these lessons to innovate and iterate our product to deliver the absolute best value to our customers - motor insurers and brokers - and in turn, their customers - policy holders.

Driving value for the insurer and insured

For a while now, the industry has been adopting the idea of creating motor insurance products that seek to objectivise the premium a customer pays by monitoring, studying and analysing driver behaviour.

Through our time working with the motor insurance industry, we have seen the opportunity to take this one step further - to not only enable insurers to analyse driver behaviour, but also establish a relationship with their customer that goes beyond just monitoring behaviour as an indicator of risk and creates value for both.

Here’s what we’ve found:

1. Behaviour is a better indicator of risk than demographics alone - data in relation to where and how safely a driver drives, such as corner braking, speed, rural exposure or night driving are far better factors when calculating premiums than the driver's name, where the driver lives or the value of their vehicle.

2. Telematics is not just effective on the traditional 'Young Driver' market. There are a number of parallels to be drawn across the entire market in both personal lines and commercial fleet. For example, exceeding the speed limit was a factor in 15% of the UK's fatal collisions in 2015, and whilst mobile phone use is widely underreported, it is continuing to be a contributing factor in numerous collisions every year.

3. Cost of devices and driver willingness to be monitored still remain common barriers in the telematics insurance environment.

Applying these learnings

Within our existing platform, we have developed some industry breaking solutions to be able to monitor and analyse distracted driving. We’re also monitoring environmental factors such as road data and are continuing to build this out with other relevant data such as localised weather and attributes about historic incidents.  

All of this starts to paint a clearer picture of driver risk, so the insurer can offer the right premiums and drivers are insured for when and how they drive. Armed with an understanding of the behaviour that correlates to claims, insurers can even help to prevent accidents from occurring in the first place.

By creating a scenario where there is value for both the insurer and the insured, customers become more willing to share their data.

While we celebrate this important milestone, we know how much more still needs to, and should be done, and we are happy to champion this in our quest for the next

20,000,000 miles of analysed driver data.

The countdown has well and truly begun.