More Analytics of Ingenie Telematics Data on the Horizon

Ingenie, a U.K. insurer that provides coverage to young drivers based on telematics data, selected SAS Office Analytics last week to bolster the analytics that it performs on its driving data.

The company's target customers are young drivers who face prohibitively high rate in the U.K. due to a poor risk profile of the demographic. Rates are adjusted every three months or so. Because of the vast amount of data this requires, Ingenie's telematics devices are always on, fitted securely by a company technician to prevent tampering.

"We capture a lot more data, at 10 hertz, which is a little more than other telematics boxes," says co-founder Richard King. "We know that one in five of [drivers under 29] will have a crash in the first 6 months, so we've developed a solution that was also a method of how to change behavior."

[Why Ingenie's UBI approach is different]

Ingenie uses its data to send color-coded driver feedback to their policyholders, then to analyze the future activity around those drivers. "Red" or "black" reports elicit a phone call from a psychologically trained call center to counsel trouble drivers. Drivers who received "red" messages for acceleration, for example, are four times more likely to make a claim.

"We have a polite conversation with them about their driving. Most kids don't unerstand insurance -- they don't know what impact poor driving is having on their rate," King explains. "We're seeing black boxes bring down the average cost of insurance by about 30%, and after a year of having a policy, they are saving up to 49% at their first renewal."

The SAS product that Ingenie is could be considered entry-level analytics software, but represents an improvement over the manual processes the company had been using for analytics. Eventually, the insurer is looking at potentially moving to a more powerful platform.

"We're getting millions of miles of driving data per week, and at the moment we don't know what data we need to keep forever and the exercise is to analyze all the data," says co-founder Chris McKee. "When we started, we had smaller amounts of data and we just used Excel programs. We found out after the first few months that wasn't going to work."

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio