Another high profile team up between an insurance company and a telematics firm has been announced, with South African insurance agency, Discovery Insurance, announcing that it’s now partners with US based telematics company, Cambridge Mobile Telematics. Together, they’re looking to create a new batch of usage based insurance packages for South Africans.
What’s interesting with Discovery Insurance however, is that while it will be offering a large batch of car insurance packages using the new telematics deal, it also dips its toes into a lot of other insurance markets, with its earliest days focused on health insurance. It will be interesting to see if it comes up with any new innovative ways to use telematics to offer its other customers similar usage based premiums. Perhaps by incorporating wearables.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics offers a standard telematics package to companies that take on its services, so it seems likely that Discovery Insurance will continue to use its tried and tested DQ-Track, which includes a bespoke hardware install and cloud based software. The special telematics solution measures your driving behaviour, taking into consideration factors like sharp braking and acceleration, as well as how you corner, how far you drive, how fast you go, what roads you drive on and a bunch of other metrics that can help build a profile of you as a driver.
Once the insurer (in this case Discovery) has a basic understanding of how you perform as a driver, it can adjust your premium accordingly. Alternatively, if it is on a usage based premium, you might be limited to a select number of miles you can drive per year or month, which if you exceed, you may be required to pay more.
In this case it seems like Cambridge Mobile Telematics will not have much involvement in the data gathering part of the deal, but instead will be handling the analysis of all the data sent its way.
“We are very excited to partner with CMT given its breadth and depth of expertise in the field of mobile telematics,” says Discovery CEO Anton Ossip, in a statement (via InsuranceTech). “Over the past year and a half, Discovery Insure worked very closely with CMT and its MIT-based experts to develop a smartphone app that allows anyone with a smartphone to monitor their trips and driving behaviour through telematics technology. This technology has incredible potential for gathering significant and relevant data from a large group of drivers to learn more about the behaviours that contribute to road fatalities and injuries.”
![hardbraking]](https://telematics.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hardbraking.jpg)
About Cambridge Mobile Telematics
Cambridge Mobile telematics is a company that specialises in converting raw sensor data from telematics hardware and smartphone apps, and into something that’s readable by humans and can be easily analysed by computers as well. It’s able to do things like track users using sporadic estimations of positioning, inferring the acceleration of a vehicle based on data from onboard accelerometers and ultimately providing a profile like break down of a driver’s skills and habits.
It’s this level of inference and explanation that has made Cambridge Mobile Telematics such a popular partner for companies looking to make use of UBI policies.
