top of page

IoT PROJECT

CASE STUDY

Industry

Insurance

 

Customer Profile

The client is a well-known mid-sized insurance company based in North America and specializes in vehicle insurance.

The client offers a range of insurance products including coverage for auto, trailers, and boats.

 

Situation Analysis

General purpose insurance companies faced a crunch in business growth as the automobile-insurance market underwent a gradual decline. Specialty insurers were gaining traction from niche customer groups. The client needed to come up with a differentiated product/service to fuel the company’s growth. The client’s gross profit margin in automobile and trailer insurance during Q1 & Q2 had decreased by 7% and 9% respectively. An obvious business solution was to offer differentiated insurance premium to different customer groups to help tailor the insurance service deals for more profitable customer groups. Acquiring this capability depended on tracking driver behavior in each of the vehicles insured by the company.

 

Another challenge that the client faced was filing multiple claims by customers who reported recurring accidents. This increased the service cost structure that the company had to bear. The company also wanted to promote safe driving by giving incentives to drivers for adopting a safer road behavior. Drivers would get bonus points for driving company insured vehicles safely. However, offering new services required that the insurance company acquired real-time behavior observation technology to monitor each driver’s vehicle driving behavior. Our client had a rough idea of what the company needed but was unsure of the technology solution that could deliver the business results.

 

Specific Problems

  • The client had numerous statistics regarding road accidents of vehicles insured through their company. The company however lacked a tangible method to track driver behavior at an individual level. Tracking driver behavior at an individual level had become essential for offering new premium packages.

  • A significant percentage of automobiles and trailers, insured by the company, reported above-average accident ratio. It drove the company’s average profit margin from these vehicles to as low as 2% per annum. To help identify the drivers who would likely exhibit risky driving behavior, thereby resulting in more number of accidents, Our consultants analyzed that driver ranking and behavior monitoring was essential to categorize drivers. It would allow the client to offer lower insurance premiums to low-risk drivers and a higher insurance premium to high-risk drivers.

  • After an initial assessment of the client’s business needs, the technology problem was narrowed down to the need for developing an innovative and real-time driver monitoring system.

 

The Solution

  • The first part of the solution was to select an appropriate device that can be plugged into the vehicle to acquire data, and relay it back to a server. A prefabricated data logging device was selected for this purpose. The second part of the solution was to manipulate/reuse the data stored on the server and provide actionable intelligence on the User Interface at client’s end. MS Azure was used to build, deploy and manage the tracked data and deliver actionable features to the end client

  • The main technologies used in developing the solution were cloud computing (Amazon Web Services), 3G & 4G GSM networks, Microsoft .net Framework, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Windows Services.

 

Key features

  1. Number of Trips

  2. Km Driven

  3. Fuel

  4. White points

  5. Overall Score

iot project

Data from the OBD II port, extracted from data logging device is relayed to the cloud using Smartphone Bluetooth over the GSM network. The data residing in AWS S3 is sent to the dumper using Windows Services. Modeled data was pulled from SQLdb that resulted in data representation on the UI.

Design/architecture of the solution

System architecture

The primary challenge that our developers had to overcome was parsing of data from the AWS database and conversion of this data into the modeled form. The challenge was overcome by developing code using the Microsoft .net framework.

 

Benefits

  • Our product delivered actionable behavioral data such as Trip start, trip end, hard acceleration, extreme acceleration, hard brake, extreme brake, and speeding

  • Using the aforementioned data sets, multiple products features such as vehicle start and stop statistics, driving routes, driving path, and real-time behavioral data of the driver was now displayed on the UI at the client end.

  • Our solution was aimed at aggregating the data and delivering an overall driver-score to the client. The scores were based on predetermined criteria.

  • Our solution also enabled the client to launch multiple products & services including PAYD (Pay-as-you-Drive, a and theft recovery services.use-based insurance model based on driver habits) PAYD (Pay-how-you-Drive) Insurance, crash detection

  • The client now obtains live feedback on driver behavior and vehicle-related events that occur on the road

  • Overall, the solution also allowed the client to identify the most profitable customer groups and tailor the company’s offerings according to the customer group it services.

 

Product features relevant to the Insurance industry

The solution included three features that are exceptionally useful for the insurance companies. These are:

  • Driver ranking: Our client is able to rank each driver on the basis of pre-determined criteria such as hard acceleration, extreme acceleration, hard brake, extreme brake, and speeding
  • Behavioral data tracking: Drivers who exhibit risky driving behavior are put under virtual observation. The crossing of threshold ranking results in downgrading of driver’s overall score.

  • Vehicle performance tracking: Insurers can virtually perform predictive analysis to assess the fleet performance by regularly monitoring the vehicle performance indicators.

 

Other Applications of the solution

  • Traffic Management

  • Real-time Car tracking

  • Roadside assistance

  • Rental Vehicle intelligence

  • Vehicle Fleet Intelligence

  • Car Sharing

 

Technologies used

  • Amazon Web Services

  • 3G & 4G GSM networks

  • Microsoft .net Framework

  • Microsoft Azure

  • Microsoft Windows Services

  • Onboard Diagnostics II

 

 

Ready to connect with a blockchain expert?

bottom of page