Review of the Year 2023: ThingCo’s Jonathon Valentine

What has been your insurance/broking related highlight of 2023?

It’s difficult to pick one, but we are now taking data from over 100,000 vehicles. Given we designed and manufactured our solar powered Theo device, created our own telematics platform and now look after all the firmware in-house, that’s a pretty amazing achievement.

On a scale of 1-10 how scared are you by the growth in use of AI with 10 being extremely worried?

If we are talking specifically about AI in insurance, the regulatory environment in which the market operates will prevent AI from being used for many of the decisions insurance providers need to make. As long as insurance providers remain heavily regulated, there should be nothing to fear from AI in insurance.

Machine learning is different as it does not mimic human intelligence – this offers huge benefits allowing processes to be automated so that human skills can be freed up to make offer a more personal level service when it’s needed.

Make one bold prediction for the insurance market in 2024 that you think might happen.

The telematics naysayers have an epiphany moment and have to eat their words.

With a General Election set for 2024, what is the one thing any party could promise as a manifesto pledge that is guaranteed to make you vote for them?

Scrapping IPT on telematics insurance products.

Roll on to December 2024: what might have happened over the previous 12 months to have made it a ‘good year’ for you?

Where do I start? We will have secured more broker and insurer partners thereby doubling the volume of vehicles from which we are receiving data; we will have reduced speeding events and improved fuel economy for many more drivers; our device agnostic counter fraud tool will have been adopted by all telematics insurance providers across the UK – whether they use our telematics solutions or not; and we will have made big in roads into the commercial arena.

It’s going to be a busy year!

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