Smartphones Can Help Reduce Driving Risk

This could be the year telematics driving data actually provides meaningful information — and change — to insurers and drivers alike, allowing risk to be underwritten more accurately, experts predict. To pull that off, smartphones will be a critical tool despite their drawbacks.

Clients’ driving data has been available in some form for a number of years now — whether installed as a black box type of device in Europe or as a dongle through the OBD-II port in North America — but it hasn’t been necessarily easy to manage or put to great use, explained Ryan McMahon, vice president of insurance and global affairs at Cambridge Mobile Telematics during a recent webinar.

Telematics has been merely a data collection tool to this point. Going forward, it can be more multi-use, such as providing feedback to the driver about their driving habits. That makes it much more helpful in terms of changing driving habits.

And it’s all thanks to one piece of technology: Smartphones. While they’ve created their own set of problems in regards to driving behaviour, McMahon said they’re changing the game when it comes to telematics and data usage.