Written by Keith Lippert
Keith was most recently Deputy Information Security Officer for Allstate Insurance Company, globally. Located here in Belfast, Keith has expertise in financial crime prevention, anti-terrorism, sanctions, money laundering, and fraud prevention. Before joining Allstate, he served as the Legal Chief Operating Officer for Barclays Bank in London and as the Vice President of International Fraud Prevention for American Express. Keith has also held the position of Chairman at banks in Russia, India, Mexico, and Canada and served as an officer of two national banks in the United States.
If you live in the UK, you have likely seen that TV advertisement where the family competes to see who’s the best driver in the house. In that ad, that’s done via an insurance company phone application. The science of measuring how you are driving is called telematics. The application (or IOT unit in your car from the manufacturer) uses an accelerometer and GPS to measure your speed, hard braking, quick starts, and in a crash airbag deployment, seatbelt lock, etc. As logical as this sounds, the best way to tell if you are a safe driver is to measure how you drive. Old markers used by the insurance industry like age, gender, or even credit score have eroded in their ability to predict good driving. They are simply not as strong a predictor as telematics.
Imagine if you can, the billions of miles of driving data from all the drivers coming into the insurance company or car manufacturers over time. Telematics opens the door to many exciting uses behind underwriting. Imagine being able to see where intersections are poorly designed, and being able to share that with a counsel. Or truly understanding how the truck you produce is being used. Payload, weight distribution, miles, and number of passengers are all valuable insights which can help design better vehicles. Could you spot where gangs are causing accidents? Hot spots where these insurance fraud gangs operate? Absolutely.
And, in the case of Patent 11,012,861 (Invented by me), telematics can be used to fight crime. If I know when and where you are driving, I can alert your bank to any log-in during that time, which would be suspicious. A key bank fraud protection tool. Take those billions of miles of driving data, overlay machine learning and AI capabilities and I’m sure you can see other fascinating possibilities and insights, as well as many more Patents. Begin capturing driver health data, (heart rates, electrocardiograms, micro-naps, etc) and now we have a whole new group of insights.
The claims process has changed significantly with telematics as well. Remember in the old days when your car needed to be driven or taken to an underwriting shop to look at the damage and estimate repair costs? Now AI and machine learning can be used to evaluate photos of your damaged car. Layer in telematics which will give the AI critical data on G-forces and direction of the impact, how and when airbags fired, and telematics gives a far better picture of what will need to be replaced based on stresses in the impact and AI learnings from previous crashes on the same vehicle. This data is also critical to car manufacturers. Again, seeing with telematics how the vehicle actually performed in a crash shows car designers if designs perform as expected in real life. This goes far beyond the crash test dummies of years ago.
The world of transportation is changing rapidly and radically. In the global workforce jobs related to transport make up many of the top 100 most populous jobs. We can count on telematics to be at the forefront of how transportation changes. Including drones, and autonomous and semiautonomous transportation technology.
