Everyone without a long spotless driving history, young or old, pay a lot for car insurance. Insurance companies have no way of knowing how safely you drive, and have to assume that you are bad at it.
But it’s not right: new drivers are not necessarily bad drivers. If you are a safe driver, we want to give you a fair chance at proving it through usage-based insurance.
Usage-based insurance means that you prove how well you drive to your insurance company by collecting data from your car: how fast, what time of day, how agressively according to breaking and acceleration, and so forth.
In that way, the insurer gets much better insight into how you actually drive than they can with traditional methods such as age, postal code and car model.
If you give people a reward for slowing down, they might just do so. We are happy to have support from both Norwegian Road authorities (Statens vegvesen) and Trygg Trafikk, who have both stated that our technology might help reduce accidents in traffic. In fact, there could be 50-60 fewer casualties in traffic in Norway each year if people drove according to the speed limit.
Our technology platform connects any car (produced after 1997) to the cloud. The platform primarily consists of three components:
The insurance company connects a data analysis tool to the API and uses the data collected to analyze driver performance.
One technology – many applications
Our platform can be used for many other applications than insurance. It can be used for automatic trip logging, driver training, fleet management and even as an anti-fraud device in leasing vehicles. We are working on these applications in parallel with the insurance case, but we believe usage-based insurance is the most innovative and valuable application.
Our team has a strong track record and more than 40 years of experience with developing and commercializing telematics solutions. With strong competence on both hardware and software development, we are fit to develop and scale our usage-based insurace technology to an international success.
Read more about our team on the bar to the right.
The global usage-based insurance market
Usage-based insurance will represent over 100 million policies generating over €50 billion (430 billion NOK) in revenue globally by 2020 (Ptolemeus Consulting Group, 2013). The largest markets are currently the US, UK and Italy, and the US in particular is expected to lead the global adoption of usage-based insurance.
However, as stated above, Norwegian authorities hope UBI will be adopted due to the prediction of fewer accidents and casualties. It is likely that they will incentivise the use of usage-based insurance to reduce the number of casualties. As state incentives were the cause of Italy’s mass adoption to usage-based insurance, we believe Norway will be an excellent market for offering usage-based insurance.
Competitors
We view our competitors as other provideres of data collecting technology.
Through Tryg and Telemotix are the first companies in Norway to get a government permit for collecting data on driving behaviour, the rest of the Norwegian insurance market are also looking into usage-based insurance. Codan is currently testing a smart phone app with their customers; Frende filed for a government permit in late 2014 with an unknown technology provider; If has been testing similar technology in Sweden (though with disappointing results due to technological limitations).
In the Nordic countries, other companies such as Movelo and Alka are working with similar concepts, but based on quite different technologies. In the US and UK there are more providers
Car insurance
In Norway, motor vechicles were insured for 20,5 billion NOK in 2014, and the market grows steadily at 4,1% annually (Finans Norge, 2014). If there is just 1% adoption of usage-based insurance in private cars in Norway (25 000 cars), it will generate about 140M NOK in revenue annually.
Our biggest barrier for introducing usage-based insurance to the Nordic market is learning how driving data describes driving behaviour.
To pass this barrier and evaluate how usage-based insurance should be offered in Norway, Telemotix has partnered with Tryg Insurance. This spring, 1000 of their insurance customers will install a TAG in their car, allowing us to collect data from more than 5 million km of driving.
Following the Tryg pilot, our platform will be fine-tuned for usage-based insurance and we can offer our insurance services to many insurance companies in Norway.
International Expansion. Before we can take our usage-based insurance platform abroad we will need to conduct similar pilots in each market, as consumer behaviour differs greatly between different countries. Most likely, we will follow up the Tryg pilot by launching a similar pilot in Sweden.
Usage-based insurance: data provider model
Telemotix will function as a technology and data provider for insurance companies. Insurance companies buy hardware for their usage-based insurance customers. Their customers’ data is sent to Telemotix, and calculated scores on how well the customer drives is sent to the insurance company.
This model is suitable, because usage-based insurance requires that insurance companies use external data providers, as privacy matters make it troublesome for insurance companies to hold all data about their customers.
Other applications
Telemotix also sell our hardware and services for other applications, such as trip logging, leasing applications and fleet management. In these applications, we generally sell hardware and take a monthly fee for service and operations.
Present
We believe we are creating something truly valuable for drivers, insurance companies and anyone traveling. If you think so too, we hope you’ll make a pledge on our campaign. Feel free to ask questions in the question tab or contacting us if you would like additional information.
Or better yet: come meet us at the Technoport Live Crowd Funding ExperienceMarch 18th!
How will we use your investment?
Your investment will bring us closer to market introduction by funding our costs in the pilot project with Tryg. More specifically, it will help us complete the software platforms we are developing for usage-based insurance. These platforms are necessary to help us scale the usage-based insurance offering beyond the pilot project and will be valuable assets for the company.
Q: How much can I save by using usage-based insurance?
A: We don’t know yet, but that’s one of the things we are going to find out through our collaboration with Tryg. However, usage-based insurance provider Allstate estimates that US insurance customers can on average save 14%. Thus, Anette in the above example could save at least 3.000 NOK each year.
Q: How unique is your technology? Is it hard to copy?
A: Making a system that functions stably requires a lot of experience and dedication. However, the most unique part of our platform is the prediction models we are developing. They give us both great insight into driver’s behaviour and risk profiles, and can also be used to monitor roads and traffic.