More Than an Observer - Carbone Still Igniting Industry’s IoT Passion
Insurance IoT Observatory is a seven-year-old think tank specialized on the insurance IoT with the participation of top executives from the most relevant Insurers, Reinsurers, and Tech players in the IoT insurance arena The Observatory is about connecting people and ideas in order to spread the innovation culture throughout the insurance market with three concrete outcomes: - a global multiclient research on the insurance IoT paradigm - one-to-one workshops to each member - plenary symposiums with all the members The Observatory engage constantly hundreds of key executives involved in the IoT programs within the members of the think tank (including 3 of the top five European insurers, 5 of the top ten US P&C insurers, 2 of the top three Japanese insurers, the largest Australian insure, one of the top two Brasilian insurers and 3 of the top six global reinsurers). Some figures about our seven editions: - 2920 hours of one-to-one workshops over the five annual editions of the Observatory - 34 plenary symposiums between North America and Europe -7 international publications
![www.carriermanagement.com Q4 2023 | 37
More Than an
Observer:
Carbone Still Igniting
Industry’s IoT Passion
By Susanne Sclafane and Guest Authors
T
here’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 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 the
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 that 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, guest
editor of this section.
“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.
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,” 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.
Special Report: Making More Connections
continued on next page
The IoT Insurance Observatory is an insurance think tank dedicated to promoting a profitable
usage of IoT data in the insurance sector. Over its seven annual editions, the Observatory has
aggregated more than 90 insurance companies, including four of the top five reinsurers, 11 of the
top 15 European insurance groups, and 10 of the top 15 U.S. P/C insurance groups—and more than
50 tech players.
Allstate, HSB, Nationwide, State Farm, The Hartford and Tokio Marine—the contributors to this
special Carrier Management edition dedicated to IoT—are current members of the Observatory,
and their executives have spoken of their experiences at the peer discussions with all the other
members.
©2023 Carrier Management | Originally Published in the Q4 2023 Issue | Page 1 of 2
Read it online: https://bit.ly/3uI95p3](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/morethananobserver-carbonestillignitingindustrysiotpassion-231210065404-69534f88/85/More-Than-an-Observer-Carbone-Still-Igniting-Industry-s-IoT-Passion-1-320.jpg)
![38 | Q4 2023 www.carriermanagement.com
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.
He basically volunteered to take on the
self-imposed herculean task of not just
gathering ideas, concepts and potential
authors (the usual task of a 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.
The insights of all Carbone’s co-authors
make us wonder a little about his official
title, “Director of the IoT Insurance
Observatory.” Online dictionaries define an
observatory as “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 (p. 37) 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 carrier
innovators and co-authoring six articles
about their IoT wins to date and 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
our regular editors have 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 moving beyond the discount-only
approaches for auto—now delivering
expanded value to personal auto insurance
customers and innovating in non-
catastrophe property, 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, 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.
Special Report: Making More Connections
continued from page 37
Matteo Carbone
©2023 Carrier Management | Originally Published in the Q4 2023 Issue | Page 2 of 2](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)