How Swiss Re is using vehicle-generated driving data

We talked to Gian Matteo Corda, Senior Partnership Manager at Swiss Re, to find out what the future holds for the automotive ecosystem and how Swiss Re's Automotive & Mobility Solutions (AMS) team plans to keep fulfilling its mission to make roads safer.

At Automotive & Mobility Solutions, we are working to drive the future of motor insurance, enabling our clients to transform daunting challenges into opportunities for growth and differentiation. This is made possible by our dedicated and talented global team, which has great competence in areas like advanced analytics, scoring, products and technology, sales and delivery. We are shaping the future of motor insurance and building the right capabilities and relationships for Swiss Re to be the re/insurance partner of choice when the autonomous driving disruption happens.

We are unique in several ways: our global network of friendly carriers, our data science and actuarial expertise, and the global scalability of our programs are just some of our unique selling points.

We all know that the cars of the future will be connected, autonomous, shared and electric (this is the "CASE" strategy that virtually all car manufacturers have been following for the past decade). That's why our suite of products is holistically designed to empower a necessary shift in motor risk assessment: insurance carriers will be forced to move from mainstream risk-scoring models based on few data points (age, driving years, vehicle info, previous claims etc) to vehicle risk-scoring models based solely on data from fully autonomous vehicles (when drivers become obsolete). Our product suite bridges this gap: we can assess the risk of increasingly autonomous vehicles only by understanding:

• Driver risk (e.g., driver behaviour);
• Vehicle risk (e.g., Advanced Driver Assistance Systems [ADAS] data); and
• Contextual risk (e.g., traffic).

The combination of all these risk factors is needed to understand their interaction: are drivers switching off ADAS? Do they know how to use the technology in their cars? Are they adapting their driving behaviour to the context in which they are driving?

We can answer these questions only by analysing telematics data.

We recently took quite a big step by offering telematics using data coming from vehicles. Thanks to our newly developed algorithm, working with connected cars. Our recent deal with Daimler Insurance Services and HDI is a great example of this: we are now able to process data coming from Mercedes-Benz vehicles and we can also include contextual information to refine the scoring model.

Car makers will impact the evolution of motor risk in two ways.

On one side, they will build vehicles that will progressively climb the automation scale up to level 5 (i.e., full automation), thus minimising and eventually eliminating completely the human factor in motor risk.

On the other side, car manufacturers will become the gatekeepers of connected vehicle data. Going forward, their importance as enablers of innovation in the motor insurance space will grow significantly.

The reason is quite simple in my view: OEMs will not own the connected vehicle data, which will remain with the customers, but they will own the platforms on which that data is hosted before being dispatched to third parties like data marketplaces or, in our specific case, insurance carriers. As mentioned above, with the shift in risk assessment from the current demographic risk models to vehicle score risk models, access to data stored by OEMs will be fundamental. In other words, car makers will be the primary source of the data on which the risk models of the future will be built.