QBE Insurance Group has, according to reports, silently pulled the brakes on its Insurance Box, a five-year-old program that used in-car sensors to track and rate customers’ speed, braking, and acceleration, offering them lower premiums for safer driving.
The comprehensive car insurance product, an Australia-first insurance offering based on telematics technology, was launched in 2013, to track in real time how cars are being driven, sending the driving data back to the insurer through either a GPS device or a phone app.
This month, however, QBE informed customers whose policies were due to expire that they had decided to “discontinue Insurance Box as a standalone product,” and that those whose policies the insurer was not able to renew would have to arrange for alternative cover and return the GPS tracking device back to QBE, The Australian Financial Review reported.
QBE also told customers that they would no longer be able to access their overall “DriverScore” via an online dashboard system, which rates customers out of five and tracks what time of day they drove and how often the car travelled on roads with different speed limits.
“We understand our decision may be disappointing and we apologise for any inconvenience,” the insurer said in the letter.
However, Ted Stuckey, head of QBE’s global innovation, said the Insurance Box was simply “under review,” and had “certainly” not been shutdown - rejecting claims that the insurance titan had failed in its move into telematics.
“The question is, is this the right technology to solve the goal of driver safety? And if we think we want to evaluate that, it makes sense to put the product on hold,” Stuckey told AFR. “We were the first and largest insurer anywhere deploying this technology, and it was a bet... it wasn’t a bet that didn’t pay off – you’ll see a lot of what we learned from Insurance Box come back in different ways.”
This year, QBE acquired 100% of Insurance Box, up from the 44% stake it first held in 2013 – a move Stuckey said would provide the company “more flexibility to iterate the product.”
“We have been able to find out how customers want to engage with insurance and what information customers were willing to provide to us in order to get the best cover possible and the economics of how that plays out,” he told the publication.
Meanwhile, the Insurance Box website remains operational, advising visitors that the product is not available for “new customers until further notice” and that QBE “strictly” protects customers’ privacy and information.
According to the site, their “telco suppliers can’t identify whose data it is, and we don’t allow any third parties to market to you. You can’t see your journey history, nor can others.”
A QBE spokeswoman said the company is not using the data collected to price risk “broadly” across the business.
“[We are] dealing with all the data we have gotten from Insurance Box through to how we build insurance products and how we forge a bond between technology and insurance,” Stuckey told AFR.
