Willis Towers Watson, a global advisory and broking services firm, has announced a partnership with Roost, a smart home technology company.

Under the agreement, the two companies will cooperate to provide solutions for the property insurance industry that are geared toward optimizing the use of internet of things (IoT) technology. IoT allows devices to connect to data networks to gather, transmit, record and process information.

“Leveraging our experience and success …in the auto telematics space, we’re eager to apply advanced analytics to reveal insights regarding the effects of home telematics on loss mitigation and customer engagement,” Claudine Modin, director of insurance consulting at Willis Towers Watson said in a company statement.

The partnership will also be key to establishing a Home Telematics Consortium of five to 10 US insurance carriers. Through the consortium, the carriers will collaborate to combine household data to measure the effectiveness of home telematics data in mitigating insurance losses for water and fire damage. The collaboration will also aim to increase customer engagement through the use of IoT technology.

“The consortium offers an exclusive opportunity for carriers to quickly attain statistically meaningful insights in home telematics with a minimized investment,” Roost chief executive Roel Peeters said in the same statement.


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