Digital Tech Summit Challenge Zoom #4: Are you a procrastinator when it comes to vehicle insurance? Guess what?! You are not alone!
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The Digital Tech Summit 2019 is merely a few weeks away — and we at ZOLLHOF are thrilled to introduce to you the fourth of our six hackathon challenges!
Last year’s competition has by far been the biggest and most exciting hacking event Nuremberg has ever seen — and in 2019, we aim for even higher goals: partnering with many companies from our huge network, we’ve created six challenges in which you and your team of talents can prove that you have the tech, the vision, and the abilities to change our society for the better!
Are you up for the task?
Make sure that you also read about the first three challenges focusing on health, sports, and mobility — and then come back here to zoom in on number four.
You’re back? Awesome! Now let’s have a look into how we can transform car insurance from being bothersome and complicated into being digital, sexy, and absolutely state-of-the-art.
In the stadium where sports legends like Andreas Köpke, Heiner Stuhlfauth, and Max Morlock have made huge names for themselves in soccer, we give you the chance to make a huge name for yourself in coding. But we’re not alone on this journey — and our partner in crime for this challenge has quite some stakes in the insurance business…
Zoom #4: Mobility challenge by NÜRNBERGER Versicherung
The NÜRNBERGER Versicherung has been around for more than 130 years. So it’s quite understandable that this company has a huge portfolio of well-established but, frankly speaking, sometimes quite conservative insurance products. Times are changing though, and they are changing faster than ever — especially when it comes to mobility: with the switch to electric and autonomous driving right around the corner, it’s about time to ask ourselves: how does contemporary insurance look like in the age of e-mobility, AI and big data?
To get your creativity kickstarted, we’ve got three real-life examples on which you can jump right away — or you let them inspire you to develop your own approach towards tackling this mobility challenge!
1. One-click insurance
Remember the days when changing your energy or telecommunication provider was a 100 % offline task? Maybe not, as for quite some time now, you can easily switch between providers with just a few clicks. Or even with just a few taps on the phone while you’re waiting in line for a hot beverage in this new hip coffee shop where everybody wears an ironic mustache or at least drove here on an e-scooter. Over the last few years, a lot of start-ups have emerged that keep making inconvenient processes like these (switching your provider, not driving an e-scooter) easier and easier — or even fully automatic.
And then there are car insurances. According to the Adcubum study “Digitale Versicherung 2019”, 80 % of customers polled in this survey are willing to shop for car insurances online. Of course, insurers have anticipated this trend and long begun to let their customers book insurances online — and also compare them, get advice, and so on. So, not much of a problem here, right?
On the contrary: while it is very convenient to book the insurance for your car online, you can not do so without some paperwork — meaning that you still have to type in details about your person and your car that are available to you only on an analog medium like your vehicle’s registration papers.
Cumbersome tasks like these make every process non-transparent, inconvenient and very unsexy. That’s why we keep pushing “switch car insurance” further and further down our to-do lists, even though, deep down inside we know it would save us a lot of money. Heck, it might even improve our insurance coverage and thereby make driving safer. If we could only pull ourselves together and just do it…
So, what do you say? Can you come up with an idea on how to tear this process apart and piece it back together in a digitally improved way? Can you imagine how to streamline the processing of information from these various data sources? What’s missing to bring the overall customer experience when dealing with car insurances into the modern age?
2. Pay as you drive
Why not go even further? Is car insurance as a product still fulfilling all of our needs in 2019? How does this fit into the age of car-sharing, electric driving, and new mobility?
In some countries, there’s a well-established concept of matching insurance products to individual customers based on their behavior. You might know this in Germany as “Telematik-Tarif” — but we’re far from having such data-driven methods as a standard for insurance products.
Let’s have a closer look at how these dynamic insurance rates work, okay?
Let’s say, you’re a conservative driver. You don’t exceed speed limits, you take your foot off the gas early when approaching a red traffic light, and you generally drive very safe. And then there is this feisty, young savage that only knows two speeds: full or even fuller speed. He dashes over the highway without ever leaving the left lane. “It’s just a trivial offense”, he thinks, as he passes by a kindergarten at full throttle. On his daily commute, he encounters at least three near-accidents — yelling and wildly gesticulating at all those incompetent drivers around him.
How is it fair that you and this dangerous driver have the same basic insurance rate? Yes, it keeps going down as long as you don’t report an accident and it rises as soon as you do — but still: the basic calculations behind your rates are identical despite being on the opposite ends of the driving safety scale.
Right, that is not fair at all.
That’s why “pay as you drive” insurance concepts were invented. As a driver, you would have to log all your drives via a blackbox in your car or an app on your smartphone. Based on the data gathered, you would get your personal insurance rate reflecting your specific driving style — if you drive safely, you’ll benefit from discounts. The insurer takes into account the days and times you’re on the road, the length of your drives, your driving speeds, how often you check your phone while behind the wheel, and more.
Having all this information about you, the insurance company is able to provide you with tailor-made car insurance… but is that really the end of the line? What if we’d use this data, cross-reference it with figures about past accidents and feed it to a predictive AI algorithm?
Would it become possible to somehow prevent accidents that way? How should a security concept for this sensitive personal data look like? How can we improve user acceptance of insurance products that are based on surveillance? How might this affect safety-aware drivers? And how can we also bring the ruthless ones on board?
If you’re a pro at juggling many datasets and checking records for plausibility, this might just be the perfect challenge for you — especially if you can also get excited about car insurance.
So start your engines and get ready to code!
3. Settling insurance claims in seconds
There is another phase of an insurance customer’s journey that we need to talk about: the time when they’ve had an accident and actually need their insurance to adjust the damage.
Thinking about this, can you already feel the anxiety bubbling up inside of you? It brings questions to your mind like: do I have the right insurance? Whose fault was the accident in the first place — and who has to pay? How lengthy and exhausting will the process off filling out forms and talking to insurance representatives be? Will my rate go up? And. So. On.
Do you know lemonade? No not the soft drink but the US-based insurance company? Processing an insurance claim and deciding about whether it is justified or not takes them around 3 seconds.
In words: three seconds.
That’s around the average time it took for a website to fully load in 2018 (according to a study from January 2018, the actual average is 3.21 seconds, but we don’t want to be nitpickers here).
How do they do that, you ask? Well, there’s an app for that with which you fill out a damage report, send it over to Lemonade, and within a blink of an eye, their advanced AI algorithm…
- … analyzes the damage you’ve reported.
- … checks if your insurance coverage is sufficient.
- … rules out any bogus claims.
You’ll have your insurance’s decision on your claim almost instantly. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? The major downer is that Lemonade specializes in insurances for homeowners and households, not vehicles.
Anyhow, the appearance of Lemonade on the market, has put a lot of pressure on fellow insurance companies. With apparent ease, it has set a new gold standard for customers — and soon they will expect similar solutions from all their other insurances as well.
Your task in this challenge is not to copy what Lemonade does over to car insurances — but to come up with your own concept of improving customer experience when settling a claim: how can damage analysis be hacked? How can we automatically detect scam and bogus claims? How do we reduce customer interaction to a minimum? Can you think of an AI that is able to estimate damages with image recognition?
That’s not an easy one — but if you like to be challenged, this seems like a perfect opportunity for you to shine!
You bring the gang, we provide the experts.
- You: Join us at the DTS 2019 and help us re-invent car insurance — but first, you need to get yourself a ticket here.
- We: Not only will there be a three-day conference with high-class speakers, exclusive keynotes, international atmosphere, and a heavy focus on tomorrow’s tech — but also this two-day hackathon with teams that keep pushing the limits of what you’ve thought possible.
- You: Get the gang together! To perform amongst the top competitors of this hackathon and come within reach of the DTS 2019 hackathon trophy, you’ll need an interdisciplinary team with skills in software development, data processing, business development, design, and maybe more.
- We: To help you get going and assist you throughout the entire competition, we drag along industry experts in marketing, software development, IT architecture, scrum methods, business development, insurances, and more!
- You: This is a competition targeted at the talents of tomorrow — but not limited to students or graduates. So, if you can get yourself excited about car insurance and you have the spirit it takes to solve tomorrow’s challenges, you’re highly welcome!
- We: At the end of the two-day hackathon, the winners will be chosen by our jury of experts and the audience: we’ll drop huge prize money on the overall best-performing team, the one with the best technical implementation and also on the winners of our audience award!
What next?
If you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend that you get yourself a ticket right away!
If you feel that this hackathon is exactly your cup of tea but car insurances aren’t — you might want to check out the five other challenges of this year’s summit.
Stop procrastinating and start making car insurance sexy again!
