Matteo Carbone

Matteo Carbone – Founder and Director IoT Insurance Observatory

Matteo Carbone is the Founder and Director of the IoT Insurance Observatory, Co-founder of Archimede Spac, Global InsurTech Thought Leader, and an investor.

He is internationally recognized as an insurance industry strategist with a specialization on innovation. Matteo is author and world-renowned authority on InsurTech – ranked among top international InsurTech Influencers – and he has spoken to audiences in twenty different countries. He published the first bestseller dedicated to InsurTech: “All the insurance players will be insurtech” and is member of the Forbes New York Business Council.

I ideated and I’m managing an international insurance think tank focused In IoT Insurance. I’m internationally recognized as an insurance industry strategist with a specialization on innovation. I’m author and world-renowned authority on InsurTech – ranked among top international InsurTech Influencers and connected to a broad and strong network of insurance innovators – and I have spoken to audiences worldwide.

Matteo has advised more than 100 different players in ten insurance markets around the world and has wide insurance experience which includes set up of industrial and commercial plans, growth strategy definition and support in the start-up of new initiatives, digital strategy development, insurance products innovation, channel strategy and commercial model definition, startups mentorship and advice M&A deals. He has worked directly with players accounting for more than 80% of the international IoT insurance volumes (number of policies on auto telematics, smart home, and connected health).

Before creating the IoT Insurance Observatory and co-founding Archimede, he spent eleven years in Bain & Company’s Financial Service practice. Matteo received his degree in Business Administration from Bocconi University, Milan.

Highlights from the Show

• Matteo’s entire career has centered around Insurance innovation, and he’s specifically focused on IoT and Telematics since 2012
• From the early days, when people were skeptical, Matteo saw the promise in the data behind IoT, but was skeptical of the buzzword activity around it and some of the ideas generated by that buzz
• One of those buzzworthy ideas is UBI or pay-per-mile, which has not taken off for carriers offering it over more traditional telematics offerings that just give you a fixed discount for driving behavior observed during a set period (like three months, or your prior year with the carrier)
• One reason is that people don’t like the uncertainty of their final cost that comes with UBI
• It’s not unlike the old days of cellphone plans where we paid per minute, whereas now, people generally prefer unlimited plans
• COVID changes things a bit as people drove less and heard more about how they could save money through UBI programs, making them more attractive, and therefore grow significantly
  • However, large incumbents with both basic telematics and UBI offerings saw that the traditional telematics offerings is 2-4x larger than UBI still
  • He still advises carriers to have a UBI offering on their shelf, but it will be the second telematics offer rather than the primary for some time, if not indefinitely
• Some wonder if IoT will make pricing so transparent that people no longer see the need to buy insurance, but Matteo points to the concept of risk pooling as a reason against this because losses will still happen regardless of your certainty around them, and individuals cannot generally afford the cost of losses, while a pool of risks can
  • Instead, the level of mutuality is reduced as you move down to smaller pools of similar risks that are more homogenous than you can get to without IoT and the data is provides
• Matteo has been more open in his doubts about some of the InsurTech carriers’ ability to survive, which he addressed, saying that he does think some will survive, but some are more storytelling than delivering a sustainable business
• But he still appreciates even these more questionable startups because they are pushing incumbents on a number of fronts, and that’s a good thing for the industry as a whole; he just advocates for a more pragmatic lens on what they’re doing that’s free of the marketing hype
• Matteo believes in innovation, and that we should be pragmatic in looking at ways data from IoT can improve customer experiences, products, tools and opportunities to upsell, cross-sell and insure new kinds of risks