(upbeat music)
-: Ben, thank you so much for being here today.
It's terrific to have you share your perspectives
about getting value from car data.
-: Thank you, Alex, thank you for having me here today.
-: Cars have recently become the most sophisticated
and expensive technology mass-market gadget
that is basically being bought by everybody.
They have millions of lines of software code
that generate vast amounts of data
but it seems like the industry has trouble
to really unlock their value.
And you have recently crossed to the milestone
of having more than 18 million cars globally connected
to your platform.
So what is your strategy?
What would you say is making up your success?
-: That's true.
We are growing rapidly.
2019, we ramped up about 12-13 million vehicles
and it's really becoming faster and faster.
And I think really that the reason we are growing fast
is the value we generate.
Most of the car manufacturers
don't want to build all the technology needed
and if you talk to the data consumers
on the other side, they will tell you,
we don't want API for every car manufacturer
and different data dictionary
and each one has his own privacy and different rules.
Everybody prefers someone in the middle.
-: You are moving into having more and more partnerships.
I would also suspect that the number of conflicts
is also going up because you need
to manage between those different parties
so how do you actually manage the trade-offs there?
-: I think we have complexities on both sides
of the platform.
We enable, for example, the providers of the data
to provide us blacklists.
I think that also the decision that we made
is to stay in the platform level.
We had many requests, Otonomo,
can you help us to do the scoring?
Can you help us with the accident reconstruction?
And we are very careful not to compete
with our ecosystem.
So part of it is really knowing
what we do best and staying there.
-: We've been looking now on one side
on your direct customers, the OEMs,
as well as on the potential data consumers.
Now, there's a third party, of course,
into this which is the end user
who is providing his data.
Don't we expect that at some point in time,
we actually will compensate
the end consumer for him sharing the data?
And actually something being happening
to his data that he may not have full control about?
-: We took a stand from day one,
the driver or the car owner, depending on the country
or the use case, is the owner of the data.
And the OEM is the custodian of the data.
He controls it but the data really belongs
to the driver or the owner.
To get the approval of the driver
or his support to use the data is by creating value.
If I bring to you services
that will benefit you, you'll be happy to share your data.
Having said that,
we really see a lot of initiatives
by OEMs to create additional value.
For example, the car manufacturer, the OEM might come
to you and say, "You know what?
"If you share your data,
I'll give you two services for free for three months."
Or you might see a car manufacturer come
and say "If you share your data,
we'll reduce five euros from the monthly leasing."
-: We will have a pretty complicated web
of interactions happening
between all of those different players.
How do you actually get to setting the right prices?
-: There're a lot of unique things around data.
Data is something that you can sell over and over.
When providing GPS from the vehicle,
we might provide it to your insurance company once
for usage-based insurance.
We might provide it again to a parking service
to help you to find parking
and again, maybe to a smart city
to improve the city
but it will have different value
and different costs associated with every time.
A lot of what we done in the last four years
is really build the knowledge
and the algorithms around it
to know first what segments wants the data
and what use cases in each segment.
And what data is needed for each one of those use cases.
And then to understand the range,
the comfort zone for the data.
What's the value of the data for the service?
How much they are willing to pay
and etcetera and build this knowledge.
The refresh rate of the data.
Is the data coming every 10 seconds or every 10 minutes?
The latency of the data.
-: If you think about the full value that can be created out
of car data, I guess nobody knows what that number is
but what would you say are the most interesting
and most valuable places?
-: Everybody likes to talk about UBI, usage-based insurance
but I think today penetration is less than 2% in the market
and in some countries, it's almost a taboo.
I think there are about a dozen horses
that will make it to the finish line.
We see some interesting use cases coming out
around residual value of vehicles.
So when someone come and sells the car,
think about the world when you can check the car data
and come with some reports saying
what's the value of the status of the vehicle?
We see a lot of value in the concierge economy.
Someone to come and view your car
or clean the car or you bought something on the web
and it will be delivered to your vehicle.
Improving your life using data.
-: Given all these complexities
and the changes that are happening,
if you taking now the long view,
the five- to ten-year view,
what is your dream image?
What is the positive outcome
that we would expect out of using data and creating value for the whole setup
of the industry and the consumer?
What's like the long-term picture you're dreaming of?
-: I hope to see a future
where Otonomo is helping to build value
around the vehicle.
Using data to enable services
that will make our life better, our life safer,
our life more convenient
and we'll make all these driving journey
of the car ownership experience better
by making a large ecosystem of services enabled
around the vehicle.
-: Ben, thank you so much for spending the time today
with us and let's now work
on building this bright future then
where we really get the value out of car data.
-: Thank you, thank you for seeing me today.
It was a real pleasure chatting with you.