Norwich Union, the insurance arm of London, UK-based financial services provider Aviva Plc, hopes to attract around 5,000 volunteers to trial the service, which will last about two years, according to Neil Laidler, head of corporate customer development, Orange Business Solutions.
The company hopes to use the data collected using the systems to determine a new mathematical formula for calculating risk based on actual car usage rather than the more abstract measures by which risk is currently measured. This in turn should lead to more tailored insurance schedules for individual drivers, and could have financial benefits for more cautious or low-mileage drivers. Vehicle-side telemetry equipment for the venture is being provided by IBM and will be fitted at no charge by a dedicated team of fitters.
Norwich Union’s initiative may not have immediate fiscal repercussions for Orange. However, the operator, the mobile arm of Paris, France-based France Telecom SA, views the wireless telemetry market, or machine-to-machine (M2M) market as a long-term investment. This is about a large volume of users doing a large number of [transmissions of] small amounts of data, said Laidler.
Orange launched its M2M Connect standards-based M2M platform to the UK business market in January, in an effort to supersede existing proprietary wireless telemetry systems and to take the technology to a broader users base, allowing corporates to develop radically new business models in a very short space of time.
For example, Mitsubishi Electric Europe adopted the platform as a means to offer remote management of its air conditioning units to companies with large numbers of dispersed offices, something it had wanted to offer customers for some time but did not have the resources to offer.
Source: Computerwire
