The recent FC-BI IOT in Insurance conference highlighted some of the key challenges faced by the industry. Existing insurance models, risk assessments and, in some areas, the move to self insurance is outpacing the Industries capabilities to adopt new technologies.
Speaker after speaker identified pragmatic value and opportunity from assessing, adopting, or re-evaluating the value insurance products. Pet, life, automotive, household as well as some speciality insurance all came under the microscope.
A good challenge from delegates concerned the readiness of the technology for society, its usage for insurance, and to create the information for new pricing models. The counterchallenge highlighted new insurance entrants, with lower product price points, and having no knowledge of the client, but gaining market share. Looks as though the consumer battle has started.
One are of debate was the time it would take insurers to be ready. Many insurer admitted that the key challenge was that the existing IT wasn’t good enough. A little digging revealed the true challenge: that insurer data hasn’t had the custodianship and care that it should have. Specifics about lack of a single view, multiple masters of data for different products, poor or no consideration of data quality and “we don’t really know what data we have” were raised at several lively discussions.
The announcement from KPN is highly relevant. It shows how todays technology adoption is moving faster than traditional business models. The Netherlands is now IOT communication ready. Startups can deploy sensors for home care, monitoring and management in social housing (reducing costs) to gated communities (providing safety and security) , animal welfare and cattle monitoring management, to smart cities all through LoRa.
To make this a commercially viable proposition for insurers to adopt though, sensing devices and communications require a platform.
In the Netherlands The Things Network (“TheThingsNetwork.org” TTN) platform provides a packaged configurable solution to integrate monitoring devices in any location. This provides immediate opportunity for insurers and for insurance FinTech.
Will the UK be next?
At the IOT in Insurance innovation awards ceremony Mike Beardmore, UK evangelist for the The Things Network (TTNReading.org) spoke to insurers, re-insurers and entrepreneursabout the existing multiple deployments of TTN in the UK, and active pipeline to implement more. Mike specifically highlighted deployments for flood warning.
Looks like it is already here!
The KPN network is a low data rate (LoRa) mobile communications network that is also compatible with the telecom’s 2G, 3G, and 4G phone network. Both the long-range and low-data-rate aspects of KPN’s network are necessary to connect “things” that cannot connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi. The greater issue for IoT with Wi-Fi is that the “things” will often be far apart. In most cases there won’t be a heavy data stream because the content of the signals will be on the order of “I’m here” with a GPS coordinate, “I’m on,” or “My temperature is xx.” Usually it will be pretty simple stuff.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/netherlands-kpn-lora-internet-of-things/
