Octo
Insights that Drive Insurance Forward

The traditional auto-insurance business model is based on static data where the customer provides all the required details about themselves including address, age, credit history, driving miles and speed to the insurer. Based on the data given, the insurer predicts whether a consumer will have an insurance loss or not—determining insurance premium pricing. However, the accuracy of the data is always at stake. Insurance companies need to embrace new technologies to revolutionize the way data is collected to create accurate premium pricing and provide value added service like crash assistance and vehicle monitoring. Octo provides the much needed next wave of dynamic data through telematics that allows insurers to get complete details on driving behavior, directly observe risk and therefore price premium appropriately. The company has transformed the auto insurance market by enabling insurers to more accurately assess and price risk, pay claims, and manage connected users.

Octo collects data using a large variety of sensors that work across the entire device spectrum from smartphone apps and aftermarket telematics devices to connected cars. The company collects information related to location, driving behavior, speed limit and driving hours and then performs analytics on the data. Insurers can benefit from end-to-end analysis across the insurance value chain, from risk assessment, driving behavior scoring, pricing support, crash alerts, emergency request service and reconstruction to web portals. “The scale of our dynamic database and predictive data analytics capabilities enables us to provide our insurance partners with more granular and accurate assessments of the underwriting risk represented by individual policyholders,” explains Jonathan Hewett, CMO, Octo. Insurers benefit from a significant reduction in the average cost of claims as well as the ability to combat fraudulent claims, streamline crash detection and improved data combination techniques that optimize data from individual resources.

To the end consumer, Octo offers driving feedback and tips so they can see the threats through their driving behavior and avoid them. Also, through this data insurance companies can reward incentives to consumers to drive more safely. “We provide a win-win model for both insurers and insured based on dynamic data sets,” says Hewett.

Over the years, what we have been able to do is make the insurer-consumer relationship far more transparent where insurers can recognize driving behaviors and provide better cheaper premium

Octo has successfully collected over 165 billion miles of driving data collected and analyzed 417,000 crashes and insurance events. With over 5.1 million connected users and the largest global database of telematics data, Octo is one of the most experienced insurance telematics company in the world, transforming auto insurance through behavioral, contextual and driving analytics. The company applies proprietary algorithms to this database to deliver powerful new insights into driver risk, informing solutions. This creates a much more rewarding experience for both insurers and insured compared to traditional techniques where insurers suffered high claims cost and consumers did not get the best deal. “Over the years, what we have been able to do is make the insurer-consumer relationship far more transparent where insurers can recognize driving behaviors and provide better, cheaper premium,” elucidates Hewett.

Most recently, Octo launched a distracted driving scoring capability to help consumers and insurers to battle the challenges in automotive and road safety. As the growth of telematics is expected to double in the future, the company is also heavily investing in linking structured and unstructured data to automate claims management completely. The crash reconstruction of the future will be a combination of various structured and unstructured data like weather data, no of passengers, the state of the car, pictures of existing damages, specific cases which will require human intervention only by exception.