IF IT’S A LOSS, YOU’RE TOO LATE – WHY THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY NEEDS TO FOCUS ON FIRST NOTIFICATION OF RISK

Simon Dicks, Insurance Channel Manager EMEA, Lytx

 

Insuring commercial fleets can be an expensive business. Average repair costs have increased by up to 40% in the past 8 years and disputes about who was responsible can drive up expenditure for both fleets and insurers.

Part of the problem is that the insurance industry hasn’t had the tools to forecast costs and premiums accurately enough in this sector. Underwriting decisions are still made in the same way they always have been, by looking back at historical data from previous years. This approach simply isn’t giving insurance companies an accurate indication of potential risk – or a proper indication of the impact of driver behaviour.

Technology is helping insurers to an extent by providing information about First Notification of Loss (FNOL) – automatically sending notifications when unusual G-force readings are captured within a black box tracking device as a result of sudden braking or impact. This is good, but far better is the ability to use proactive technology to detect when an incident is at risk of occurring and when a driver is distracted.

The only way to address this is to put a highly accurate level of camera technology both inside and outside cabs, supported by sophisticated technologies such as Machine Vision (MV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This way, we can see not just that an incident has happened, but why it happened. What’s more, we can assess risk before an accident happens at all and prevent it happening in the first place. We call this First Notification of Risk (FNOR) – and it’s a whole step up from FNOL.

Machine Vision scans the internal and external environment of the vehicle to identify distracted driving behaviours such as mobile phone use, eating, drinking, smoking, inattentive behaviour or failure to wear a seatbelt. AI, comparing the behaviour against a vast bank of accumulated data, is then able to determine the riskiness of that situation and whether it needs to be flagged to the fleet manager, driver, or insurer via a short video clip. The big difference in this approach is that it’s proactive, not reactive. For the first time, fleets and insurers can identify adverse driving and distracted driving in real-time for the first time.

This includes the ability to alert drivers of any momentary slip-ups or distracted behaviours. Using the same technology, drivers will receive an audio or visual alert to help keep them on track and to lessen the likelihood of a moment’s distraction becoming anything more.

When insurers have access to these insights, they can also start to see patterns from the data over time. For example, a fleet manager might start to see that there’s a peak in risky driving behaviours on a Friday afternoon when lots of drivers are rushing to finish for the weekend. As a result, they may decide to spread the shifts differently so as to avoid that pattern of behaviour.

When insurers are only looking at FNOL, it’s already too late. A driver could be unthinkingly driving whilst smoking, on their phone, and nobody would never know. Whereas with FNOR, both managers and insurers are provided with insights that remove the guesswork, and underwriters have the information they need to assess risk with far greater precision.

There’s still a long way to go in making the move towards FNOR. With so many different companies selling cameras and telematics systems and producing information in hundreds of different formats, claims data will have to be standardised before the sector can really transform. However, by starting to embrace ideas like FNOR, the industry can move towards a solution that saves them time, money and lives.

To find out more, visit  www.lytx.com/FNOR

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