Keeping ahead of the technology curve
Date
25/01/23
Author
Armin Kia, Mohammad Alinia & Néstor Alonso
Read time
5 minutes

There are very few markets as competitive as car insurance, and there are almost no legal protections when it comes to product innovations. Therefore, you can be pretty sure that your product innovations are going to be replicated by copy cats as soon as they’re deemed successful.
In this environment, the only way to stay ahead of the competition is to build technologies that are difficult to replicate, and that enable a faster pace of change compared to the competition.
Hence it should come as no surprise that technology is one of the three pillars at Driverly. Our three business pillars are customers, data and technology.
But with technology constantly evolving, how do we stay ahead of the competition? Here we take a quick peek behind the Driverly curtain.
AI and Big Data
If data and technology are the sources of differentiation, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have to be the core of your capabilities. Many companies talk about AI and big data analytics… But few have access to the amount of data that Driverly captures about each customer.
Through our Driverly App, we get a snapshot of customers' driving behaviour at a frequency of 1 Hz (1 snapshot per second). This gives us access to a wide range of data about when, how and how much customers drive.
Obviously, this is a vast amount of data. In order to make sense of it, we use AI models to analyse this information – which is used for pricing, underwriting, anti-fraud and customer engagement purposes. While these analyses happen behind the scenes, they’re going to be the most important source of competitive edge for Driverly.
Proprietary Technology
Time to market is key when it comes to innovation, and your technology is the key enabler for these changes... Or perhaps the bottleneck if you have too many weak links in your technology chain.
We’ve built almost all of our key systems in-house on cloud platforms. And while this means a higher investment at the outset compared to buying off-the-shelf products, it empowers us to build bespoke platforms tailor-made to our needs.
And – more importantly – independence from third-party systems means we can change and react more quickly than we would if we were locked in.
Agile Methodology
Time to market is as much about your technology frameworks and platforms as it is about your development methodology.
In Driverly we're obsessed with Agile. In fact, the first document we ever pulled together for Driverly was ‘Driverly as an Agile organisation’. The purpose was to ensure the co-founders are on the same page in respect to our methodology.
We believe agile isn’t merely a technology development framework, but a methodology to manage our business. And we also believe our lean and efficient practice helps us deliver innovation much faster than our competitors.
Research & Development Partnerships
You can never do everything by yourself. Well, you can... but you’ll be slow, and far removed from the cutting edge.