The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Want cheaper car cover? Prove your worth using your GDPR data
Motorists are being roadblocked from taking advantage of new laws giving them control of their data to get better deals because Britain’s biggest insurers are unable to process it.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives consumers greater control over the way financial institutions use their personal data, including the right to request any information a firm holds on them.
This could include data on their driving history gathered by car insurers using a telematics device, commonly known as a “black box”. Experts say this information could help people get cheaper car insurance, if it proves they are a safe driver, but so far, despite preparations for GDPR beginning several years ago, firms have been overtaken by the law.
When asked by Telegraph Money, only one of the seven biggest insurers in Britain said it would consider telematics information from another provider when calculating a premium. A few others said it was something they were looking to do in the future.
Telematics is long-established as a way for young drivers to keep the cost of car insurance down. The insurer will install a black box in the car which tracks driving statistics, such as average speed and braking, and assign a score. Drivers deemed safe will be offered a lower renewal price.
Because these advantages depend on the insurer’s access to your black box data, you have to stay with the same company, or start from scratch with a new one.
GDPR, which became effective in May, means that customers should now be able to take this historical data and use it to get better deals elsewhere. But while drivers can request the data from their insurer, most companies still have no way to make use of the results.
Selim Cavanagh, of insurer Ingenie, which specialises in providing car insurance for young people, said the company had allowed customers full access to their telematics data for several years, but demand had been low, with only a handful of them making a request last year. Ingenie does use data from other companies to
While insurers are playing catch-up, drivers can still take advantage of new data laws, writes Sam Meadows
attempt to give new customers better deals, but Mr Cavanagh said the quality of the information varied.
“If we take other companies’ data it won’t be as good as ours but we can still get some value out of it,” he said. “We can establish whether someone is a really good driver or someone who needs to improve.
“Credit scores are trusted by the industry as a measure of someone’s risk and it made it more straightforward for people to get credit. The same thing could happen in insurance.”
A spokesman for LV=, which has almost 2.5 million policyholders, said: “We would offer a discount to customers who transferred us data from another telematics provider if it showed that they were a safer driver.
“However, not all telematics providers collect the same level of data or present it in a format that we may be able to access.”
The other six insurance brands to have at least two million policyholders in Britain – Direct Line, Admiral, Aviva, Hastings Direct, the AA and Churchill – said they did not accept telematics data from other companies. A spokesman for Hastings Direct said: “Insurers generally use their own unique and proprietary algorithms to create driving scores for their customers. The same driving score can mean different things to different insurers.”
The AA has a similar policy, but a spokesman said that call centre staff could use their discretion to take a good driving record into account, “so it is worth asking the question”.
The ways people can use GDPR to get better deals go beyond car cover. The obvious one is other types of insurance, such as health and travel.
Julian Saunders, from PORT.im, a firm specialising in data policy, said: “You could ask Vodafone for your information and get your billing history, your data usage, how often you go abroad. Then you can go and get a contract that suits your needs.”
The simplest way to request an entire record of your personal data is to use a subject access request, which is free to do.
Most institutions will have a page on their website explaining how to do this, or the Information Commissioner’s Office has a template form you can send to companies.