The Telematics Data Problem
From cookie tracking to step counts. From market surveys to click counts. Data is omnipresent in our personal and business lives.
RPS’ 2025 Transportation Market Outlook Report notes that “…adoption of technology, such as telematics and dashcams, is now even more vital. Crucial for both improving safety and underwriting performance, its inclusion must be complemented by reliable data analytics…”.
However, reliable data analytics are not tenable without reliable telematic data. One of the biggest barriers to the desired reliability is the range of approaches that telematic providers take to characterizing the data that they collect.
While it would seem logical that location should be location and speed should be speed – regardless of who is reporting the figures – the reality is quite different. Providers collect substantially the same core data elements, but there is no common language shared by all. Nor are there universal standards to characterize and interpret the collected data elements.
Why Standards Matter
This state of affairs is contrary to the interests of fleets / policyholders, insurers, and ultimately, and ironically, telematics providers themselves. Without a common language, fleets struggle to integrate across multiple providers, constraining the options available to them in the marketplace. Inconsistent terminology and normalization tactics also frustrate fleets’ ability to build consistent metrics for tracking and promoting safe, efficient usage – much less share them with interested parties, such as their insurance providers.
Equally, without a universal decoder ring, insurance companies struggle to accept and interpret data from different telematic providers in their underwriting processes, and in turn, hamper the ability of fleets (and their agents / brokers) to differentiate their management diligence and risk profiles. In addition, those insurers bold enough to try and reconcile the data disparities on their own, incur higher frictional costs, which ultimately must be passed on to their policyholder customers.
Last, by frustrating the ability of their constituencies to easily use collected data, telematics providers at the very least limit their available market and saddle their existing and prospective clients with unneeded effort and confusion.
To very loosely paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, telematics providers are common companies separated by a common language. Most telematic data “differences” are more semantic than substantive. You call it “Location”. We call it “Geolocation”. Potato. Potaaahto. As an industry, we, as telematics providers, should be able to both bridge the semantic gap as well as unite to do the right thing for our customers and trading partners. We all know that the data itself is not our secret sauce. We differentiate by what we enable our customers to do with the data.
A Common Language, A Shared Win
Fortunately, there are low cost / low effort options, such as capitalizing on the work being undertaken by ACORD to cohere a Commercial Insurance Telematics Standard.
Common standards create advantages for all. They would enable fleets to more efficiently manage their operations across multiple providers as well as demonstrate their track record of safety and usage patterns to a wider range of insurers.
Common standards would allow insurers to achieve greater data consistency and comparability on top of enjoying better connectivity with reinsurers and claims organizations. In turn, insurance companies would realize lower costs for development and upkeep while reducing compliance and vendor risk. Understandably, lower costs and higher efficiency for insurers would also create better outcomes for policyholders on what is otherwise a very challenging commercial auto landscape.
A telematics lingua franca would also be a boon to telematics providers themselves. With insurers more easily able to receive, interpret, and use telematics data, adoption would elevate in what to date has been a largely underpenetrated market segment. Improved and more rapid first notice of loss protocols would create opportunities to drive better outcomes for fleets and insurers – further proving the value of telematics and dash cameras in combating a plaintiff bar run amok. Common standards would also make it easier to synchronize with IoT initiatives, creating opportunity for expansion into adjacent business sectors. Last, eliminating the need for one-off integrations would reduce frictional costs and cut sales cycle times.
Last but far from least, safety is a broad public good. So, adoption of a common telematic standard actually presents opportunity for not just a win/win, but a win/win/win/win.