According to a Gartner research manufacturing, utilities and transportation will be the top three verticals using IoT in 2015 – all together they will have 736 million connected things in use. By 2020, the ranking will change with utilities in the No. 1 spot, manufacturing will be second and government will be third, totaling 1.7 billion IoT units installed. “Government will take the No. 3 spot as it invests in Smart Street and area lighting for energy saving reasons, Utilities will move to the No. 1 position because of investment in smart meters.”
Though financial services is investing only 13% on sensors amongst the top industry vertical (ref:Digital IQ Survey by PWC) but this is set to change as more insurance and banking corporations recognize the importance of iOT in their Customer facing offerings and employee facing offerings. The typical use cases where insurance and financial industries can benefit from iOT could be
- Usage of wearables and smart monitoring devices for preventive health management – The scope could be as complex as medical stents emitting information that could predict and prevent a potential heart-attack to as simple as monitoring dietary habits through wearables. This is also getting converged under the mHealth initiatives and iOT would probably also facilitate greater collaboration between payers and providers.
- Smart home appliances like water leakage detector, air purifiers etc. could bring down property claims drastically and in turn bringing down the loss ratio further. Complex natural disaster predictive sensors for tsunamis, earthquakes etc. could reduce the causality and property loss, thus leading to less insurance claims
- Sensors that monitor electricity, gas and fuel usage could help a customer monitor and cut down the monthly outgo on utilities and sensors in refrigerators and ovens could help consumers keep a track of their consumption patterns and then provide the best deals proactively for buying daily use items.
- Air pressure monitoring equipment also known as smart TPMS devices can help prevent accidents and causalities and active weather and road condition monitoring devices can predict what could go wrong on which turn thus preventing accidents and respective claims. This in all would bring down accidents and also a more satisfied customer
- Fire safety sensors could proactively detect a short circuit in a house or within an enterprise enabling either shutting down of respective units or calling the fire safety teams thus reducing the overall damage to life and property and in turn less number of claims
- Some of the use cases could go up to identifying the weather conditions and letting a customer based on his health advice what precautions he/she needs to take because of allergies, diseases like flu etc. thus reducing the overall medical claim.