Gaming apps take risk out of car insurance

Baseline Telematics helps insurers understand customer driving habits before issuing policies

A leading developer of telemetric solutions for the insurance industry, Baseline Telematics relies solely on cloud infrastructure to deliver its innovative offerings.

“Our solutions are 100 percent cloud hosted,” says president and chief executive officer Paul-André Savoie. “Insurers don’t have to worry about supporting the workloads or data required for running our systems.”

The company creates usage-based platforms to meet a broad range of customer needs, from gauging the performance of young drivers to managing fleets of municipal snow plows. “Our secret has always been verticals,” Savoie says. “We tap into niche markets to help insurers underwrite risk more effectively.”

The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices in recent years presented Baseline with the opportunity to serve insurance markets in a whole new way. “We create mobile apps that serve as the telemetry device on customer smartphones and capture data on driving behaviors,” Savoie says. “We’re finding that this is what insurers really want to go to market with — they want to launch an app as a game for customer download and gather data ahead of introducing their insurance programs.”

“Users unlock badges and medals for driving safely in all kinds of conditions,” he adds. “No speeding, hard braking or over accelerating. We can also see things like whether drivers are slowing down when approaching traffic incidents. Every month, there’s a ranking board and leaders win different prizes.”

Information collected through the apps is invaluable for insurance companies in creating policies and reaching out to potential customers. “Actuaries have baseline data to use in assessing risk,” Savoie says. “Plus, insurers have all of the users captured as leads in their CRM systems. The app turns into an insurance sales tool.”

As demand for its insurance innovations continues to grow, Baseline must quickly and agilely deliver them to customers around the globe. “Many insurance organizations worldwide require dedicated, in-country hosting,” Savoie says. “The SoftLayer cloud platform is the perfect global solution for us.”

With SoftLayer hosting infrastructure, Baseline is launching new projects for insurance customers throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America and New Zealand. “It only takes about an hour to set up a SoftLayer bare metal server environment for a new customer,” Savoie says. “That’s the easiest part of delivery. We just spool it up and turn it on.”

“Every customer we work with has a different business plan and is in a different market,” he adds. “SoftLayer gives us the flexibility to pick and choose which parts of our platforms are applicable from one organization to the next, quickly deploy them and work closely with the customer to deliver a fully customized solution.”

The cloud delivery model allows Baseline to move rapidly in targeting new opportunities worldwide. “Insurance prices in Malaysia used to be government mandated, but now insurers can set their own rates,” Savoie says. “There’s a huge appetite now for telematics solutions — it’s like the birth of the industry in that country. We have some exciting projects we’re working on there.”