Santa’s elves have been working away on a gift for auto insurers in the form of a telematics standard for Canada, due to take effect in January.
Over the past several months the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) has been working on a telematics data standard for the industry, and now it is set to release the standard in the new year.
“Telematics is rapidly becoming an important technology for the auto industry and in order to fully realize the potential of this technology, a data standard is necessary,” says Catherine Smola, president and CEO of CSIO. “CSIO is committed to delivering a telematics standard that meets the needs of the industry and helps support our members as they continue to provide value-added benefits to their customers.”
Telematics devices record and transmit information about driver behavior. By recording factors such as where, when, and how often vehicles are driven, insurers can develop specific insurance programs and pricing to more accurately reflect driver characteristics. This information can offer the consumer many benefits, including discounts and potentially safer roads. The new CSIO telematics standard will provide a way of transmitting telematics information between multiple business partners, enabling data quality and consistency across the industry. (continued.)
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Telematics is – so far – a voluntary option, but black boxes are becoming a standard feature on new automobile models. CSIO recognizes this emerging trend and is working with the Canadian P&C marketplace to deliver data standards for telematics, says Smola.
CSIO will release two telematics messages in January 2014, including VehicleTelematicsNotify.
This message will allow telematics data providers to deliver data to data consumers (typically insurance carriers). These messages provide a standard XML method to package and deliver vehicle telematics data in multiple formats (e.g., a summary view vs. a detailed view).
“The Response message is a simple message allowing the receiving systems to comment back to the sending system on the data that it has just received,” Hans Gantzkow, CSIO’s lead on Telematics, told Insurance Business. “Examples of responses include: Success, Error, Rejected, etc.”
VehicleTelematicsNotify will also provide information needed to implement and deploy telematics data delivery in a standard way. This will enable data quality and consistency, allowing single implementations to connect with multiple business partners.
According to CSIO, it will allow for the automation of data integration, reducing manually introduced errors and improving data consistency and workflow auditability; providing a standard telematics data format delivered to insurers will improve analytic consistency and reduce the need to support multiple data interfaces.
