Stay Up To Date on the Usage Based Auto Coverage Marketplace
Articles about Usage Based Insurance are becoming much more frequent and prominent as the marketplace evolves. Much UBI news involves press releases from insurance companies that have gotten onto the bandwagon or hardware vendors who are constantly expanding the capabilities of the product. Despite the fact that you are plugging a small device into your car’s on-board diagnostic port, you may be dealing with a product that can independently measure acceleration, turning speed, and even crash events while it communicates data over a cellphone network, Bluetooth connection, or WiFi signal.
Of course, the biggest news items promoted by sellers will be the price difference. There are already many car insurance companies touting the rate reduction, sometimes up to 30%, in exchange for agreeing to be monitored by a device that sends streams of data to strange servers around the world. Under the auspices of rewarding safe drivers, insurers will be able to collect hyper-accurate mileage and usage data that may be cross referenced against posted speed limits, weather conditions, and business address information. This could be useful for insurers or law enforcement when reconstructing driver activities, especially if you spend several hours parked at a tavern prior to a collision. You can be sure to read news stories about how the telematics device became the “smoking gun” in a hit-and-run case. In the same vein, constant monitoring may exonerate falsely accused suspects since it can serve as an alibi as well as a permanent record of every place you go in your car.
Financial news tracking of UBI-enabled insurance companies is also expected to spike leading up to the year 2020, when usage-based devices are expected to be the dominant form of consumer data collection. Quarterly reports and annual reports already trumpet the usage of UBI as a portion of a corporation’s profitability. Venture capital firms are providing the backing for independent insurers that may be insuring cars by the mile, and certainly many of the technology and insurance product sellers will either merge or get absorbed by industry behemoths. OEMs will tout tools that integrate data collection and transmission without the need for the installation of a dongle. Investors may even be able to create ETFs for UBI insurers, and until usage-based coverage becomes part and parcel of all policies where you could not imagine a world without it (like the cornflake without the milk) then the field is expected to generate a flurry of coverage that will certainly make you sick of hearing about it.
Trade News
Finally, there is the marketplace itself and the players who make the trade papers when they are hired, fired, or moved to different divisions. In much the same way that the Internet is moving from desktops to mobile devices, UBI adoption is quickly eating into a very traditional and conservative marketplace that is based on decades of actuarial research and customer modeling. The kind of big data analytics required for processing input from millions of telematics devices means that you can expect news items about servers, analytics software, CRM integrations, data breaches, mobile app development, and of course all the employment that is going to follow these new projects.