BNP Paribas Cardif (Nanterre, France), a global personal insurer, and FollowAnalytics, a San Francisco-based enterprise mobile customer engagement start-up, debuted a telemetry based “smart home,” Internet-of-Things insurance offering at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco yesterday. The Habit@t solution includes a monitoring unit that uses sensors to detect hazards – such as fires, floods and blackouts – and then triggers an alarm to alert the customer and notify a call center capable of dispatching an appropriate response immediately.
Habit@t, which is currently offered in Italy, according to a FollowAnalytics source, uses the FollowAnalytics Mobile Marketing Platform and was developed on Samsung’s SAMIIO cloud-based open software platform, which can bring together diverse data from a variety of sources for analytical purposes, the FollowAnalytics source says.
The development platform is designed to allow devices and sensors to securely store data in the cloud in a format- and structure-agnostic fashion. SAMIIO makes more information available to applications and services in order to provide better insights, according to FollowAnalytics.
Grégory Desfosses, Chief Digital Officer, BNP Paribas Cardif.
“Our industry is on the brink of major technology-driven change, creating exciting opportunities for us to significantly enhance our customer engagement model with new value-added, personalized services,” comments Grégory Desfosses, chief digital officer, BNP Paribas Cardif. “By working with companies such as FollowAnalytics and Samsung, we are seizing these new opportunities to make step-changes in our business to meet the needs of our customers and secure our market leadership into the future.”
The Habit@t offering represents a departure from the traditional indemnity product offered by an insurer into a personal risk management services relationship between carrier and client, according to Jamie Bisker, senior analyst, Aite Group. The product works on several levels, Bisker notes.
(Related: Insurance and the Internet of Things: Google’s Nest Labs Acquisition)
“First, it engages customers who are more generally risk aware and are willing to participate in the new ‘personal risk management’ paradigm and that takes them to the top of the select list,” Bisker notes. “In addition, it provides PNB Paribas Cardif with a secondary inspection capability at the time of the installation of the sensors. Finally, the Internet-of-Things aspect continues to support the insureds’ risk awareness via their own active monitoring via smart devices – it’s a win-win all around.”
Samir Addamine, CEO, FollowAnalytics asserts that his firm’s offering is the first enterprise Mobile Marketing Platform to fully embrace Internet-of-Things. “By combining mobile and Internet-of-Things analytics with our powerful contextualization engine and machine learning marketing algorithms, we are at the heart of industry transformations for global leaders such as BNP Paribas Cardif,” Addamine remarks.