There’s an image accompanying the next article of this special report showing a closeup profile view of a visionary whose mind is connected to a network of things. (The State Farm Vision: Ecosystem Capabilities for the Insurer of the Future)

The illustration of this innovator peering into the future was conceptualized by Carrier Management’s art director, with the help of AI, to represent the words of the headline, “The State Farm Vision: Ecosystem Capabilities for the Insurer of the Future.” And it’s a fair representation for an article written by IoT Insurance Observatory Founder Matteo Carbone and State Farm’s Vice President of Innovation Haden Kirkpatrick, in which the two authors advise industry peers to adopt platform-based strategies of intercompany partnerships to capitalize on the increasing availability of data from IoT devices and to create seamless customer experiences—basically to emulate the centuries-old carrier which has partnered with ADT and other home ecosystem players as it leans into the future.

But it’s a better representation of Kirkpatrick’s description of Carbone.

“He is a one-man hub for all things insurance innovation. This allows him to see around corners and project the future better than any other thought leader in this space,” Kirkpatrick said.

“Matteo’s network and experience spans the globe…If you want to know where our industry is going (or how we are going to get there), then just ask Matteo and he’ll paint you a picture of the future,” he added, noting that he found in Carbone “a like-minded and future-focused innovator” in his eight years of working with the IoT Insurance Observatory founder.

Other co-authors had similar insights about Carbone’s global connections with all the major players fusing IoT and insurance, his future-focused mindset, and the depth of his knowledge about all things IoT.

“He is omnipresent at the intersection of IoT and insurance,” said Dan Campany head of the IoT Innovation Lab at The Hartford. “To do what he does—the number of member meetings and presentations, living on airplanes and hotels— you have to have a deep passion for IoT solutions and hunger for new ideas and insights.”

“He has a special talent in bringing together great innovative minds that are pushing our industry forward. Matteo’s passion and desire to make an impact in this space make him a trusted and influential voice when it comes to IoT solutions,” said Kelly Hernandez, associate vice president for Personal Lines Telematics at Nationwide.

“Matteo is passionate and active about identifying and sharing key trends in the IoT space to companies like Allstate, worldwide.” Allstate and Carbone believe “that transforming business processes and delivering additional benefits to customers is now, not distant future with the rapid technology evolution,” said Susanna Su, vice president of Telematics and UBI at Allstate.

“The insights he [has] brought by looking at the world market provide critical thinking and strategic opportunities.”

Taken together, Carbone’s network of industry experts, his vision of the future, his deep knowledge of a featured subject and willingness to share ideas and experiences would be the perfect combination to steer Carrier Management in the direction of inviting him to be a guest editor. But that’s not how it happened.

More Than an Observer

Carrier Management first encountered Carbone around six years ago, speaking at an industry conference about struggles that U.S. insurers were having as they tried to put the concept of marrying data from onboard diagnostic devices to auto insurance into action. We invited him to write his first Carrier Management article, “UBI Is a Failure, But Telematics Insurance Is Working Extraordinarily Well,” and he delivered an analysis of the success of Italian insurers in delivering productivity (revenue growth), profitability to their organizations, proximity to customers through multiple touchpoints and persistency (customer retention, renewal rate increase)—what he refers to as the Four Ps measure of InsurTech impact.

After later co-authoring a series of wildly popular articles about the lagging KPIs of VC-backed InsurTech carriers Lemonade, Root and Metromile on social media, and offering them to Carrier Management to republish, we reached out to Carbone and his co-author Adrian Jones to consider a guest editor assignment on the topic of Insurance Innovation and Strategy. (“Startups Face Off Against Established Players,” November/December 2018)

Three years later, Carbone contacted Carrier Management with the idea of providing a series of articles about P/C insurance use cases for IoT technology. Essentially, he volunteered to take on the self-imposed herculean task of not just gathering ideas concepts and potential authors (the usual task of a Carrier Management guest editor) but co-authoring every piece of content in the featured section of the third-quarter 2021 magazine, titled “Insurance Is Getting Connected: IoT Arrives in Insurance.” He did this after having spent 10 months collaborating with Isabelle Flückiger, director of new technologies and data for The Geneva Association, to research and interview more than 100 players and thinkers in the IoT space to produce the Geneva Association report, “From Risk Transfer to Risk Prevention: How the Internet of Things is reshaping business models in insurance.”

“It does not matter in which time zone Matteo is. When the audience needs him, he devotes his time even in the middle of the night. When the customer requires new insights, he delivers on time,” wrote Flückiger in a summary of the lessons she learned collaborating with him on the report.

The insights of all Carbone’s co-authors make us wonder a little about his official title, “Director and Founder of the IoT Insurance Observatory.”

If you search online for an answer to the question, “What is the purpose of an observatory,” one answer that you might come across is this one: “An observatory is a facility for observing or monitoring environmental conditions or phenomena on Earth or in space.”

Clearly, Carbone isn’t simply an observer. You can compare the accompanying photo of Carbone in action, proselytizing about the insurance future of proactively preventing risks, with an AI-generated illustration of an observer of technology advances to start to appreciate the difference. In his own proactive style, he became guest editor for this edition because he reached out—again—volunteering for the extraordinary task of gathering six insurance carrier innovators and co-authoring six articles about their IoT wins to date and their visions for the future.

“I believe in the education of the sector. It is relevant to show how these ideas are not due to an exotic and temporary enthusiasm but are the results of years of lessons learned in different insurance domains,” he wrote in an email at one point during our production process.

“Over the course of the past eight years, we have engaged in numerous discussions about this visionary outlook, the strategy essential for its realization and the requisite competencies that must be cultivated within the industry,” he said, stating the mission of the Observatory.

Making More Connections

In this collection of articles, for which Carrier Management has chosen the cover title, “Making More Connections: Innovating for an Insurance IoT Future,” Carbone and his co-authors describe how the prototypical underwriter, inspector, claims adjuster or insurance risk management expert—the “clipboard guy” on our cover—is progressing toward a “Connect and Protect” future, where ubiquitous sensors and the insights they generate allow insurers and customers (and sometimes the devices) to proactively manage and reduce risk.

The articles describe more insurers finding more ways to incorporate the Internet of Things into different lines of business and different parts of the insurance value chain than our prior “Getting Connected” edition did, with many insurers moving beyond the discount-only approaches they based on auto telematics data—now delivering expanded customer value to personal auto insurance customers and innovating in non-catastrophe property insurance, commercial auto, workers compensation.

Still, Carbone isn’t likely to rest anytime soon. On the flipside of a smart home vision at State Farm, enhanced customer engagement at Nationwide and Allstate, and real-time risk mitigation and behavior modification activities at Tokio Marine, The Hartford and HSB—and more—detailed in the pages that follow, there are still also-rans. Full realization of the promise of IoT across the industry is still a future event.

“We see the industry at an important inflection point. While great progress has been made, the tipping point of insurance IoT has not happened despite its proven impact and diverse value propositions,” Carbone and HSB’s Gordon Hui write in an article about HSB’s evolution in risk prevention with IoT, which ends with a must-read clear outline of the “strategy essential for [industrywide] realization” of the future vision that the IoT Insurance Observatory promises.

“Regrettably, it remains all too common to witness insurers adopting IoT-based risk prevention as a supplemental activity, as opposed to truly integrating it into their core strategy,” Carbone and Hui write in an online bonus article, “The Bottom Line: Why Property Insurers Need to Move Past IoT Exploration to Strategy Integration.”

***

This article is featured in Carrier Management’s fourth-quarter magazine

Related articles include:

• The State Farm Vision: Ecosystem Capabilities for the Insurer of the Future
• The Tipping Point for Insurance IoT: How HSB and Its Partners Are Creating a Playbook for the Future
• Nationwide Insurance: Using a Decade of Learnings to Create Next-Generation Telematics Solutions
• Real-Time Data and Mitigation: How Tokio Marine Is Changing Risky Behaviors
• Repeat, Repeat and Repeat Again: How The Hartford is Embedding IoT Capabilities in Commercial Insurance Businesses
• Allstate’s Telematics Strategy Responding To Evolving Customer Needs

All of the articles in the magazine are available on the magazine page of our website.

Click the “Download Magazine” button for a free PDF of the entire magazine.

To be able to read and share individual articles more easily, consider becoming a Carrier Management member to unlock everything.