IoT Business News has met with Ivan Mishanin, CEO of Bright Box, a market leader in the connected car sector. During this interview Ivan gave us a view on the company’s latest achievements and shared his vision on future mobility.
How many cars in the world are equipped with a Remoto-based solution today?
As a B2B vendor and provider, Bright Box digitizes automotive OEMs, National Sales Companies, Regional Headquarters, and Dealers with a Turnkey Connected Car Platform. And today its various services are used by about one million drivers in more than 30 countries around the world. We have successfully embedded our technologies for Toyota, Genesis, Honda, BMW, KIA, Infiniti, Mitsubishi, and MG/SAIC, increasing customer retention and making the end-user’s life more comfortable.
Which services are the most popular (from your direct customers’ and end users’ points of view)?
We are constantly analyzing the functionality offered by us and our competitors. And according to our data, popular features with connectivity among dealers include remote diagnostics, the dealer locator, in-app service maintenance requests, business process improvement, analytics and reporting, lead generation, and CRM integration. The most popular services among customers are geolocation, vehicle health report, and remote-control services.
Being part of Zurich Insurance, do you have any solution to support usage-based insurance services?
According to Ernst & Young, 88% of all new cars in 2025 will feature embedded telematics. Intel research shows that connected cars are the third-fastest growing technology market after phones and tablets. So the increasing adoption of telematics and connected cars is expected to drive the usage-based insurance market. Regarding research and markets, the usage-based insurance market for automotive industry is projected to reach USD 126 billion by 2027 from USD 24 billion in 2019, at a CAGR of 23.0%.
Being part of Zurich Insurance, we are working on a list of initiatives to make a relevant solution that will be useful to the market and in demand among users based on our innovative technology.
What are your main drivers for growth in terms of services and geography?
The main growth-drivers are the active development of services and the monetization of these services, both through selling them to car manufacturers and through the joint sale of these services to end-customers. There are many products and services in the company’s portfolio that we already offer, and we expect to expand this portfolio, including geographically.
What are your main areas of technical innovation for the future of Remoto?
The company’s key innovations will be in the area of data processing and providing smarter services based on it for our customers, automakers, distributors, dealers, and car owners. Our focus is on making the automobile smarter. To provide more intuitive services to the end-consumer.
How are you using AI today in your solution?
We use AI and ML in different parts of our platform. Most importantly, these technologies allow us to provide services when they are most useful, both to the distributor with the dealer and to the end-owner of the car, simplifying the daily use of the car. And we allow the automaker to better analyze the data they have to improve their models.
What is your vision of today’s evolutions around urban mobility: car sharing, electric cars, autonomous cars? What opportunities (or threats) do you anticipate from those new trends in mobility?
Carsharing, at the moment, unfortunately, has not shown its effective economic model. There are no financially successful companies in the field of carsharing. It is possible that the technology simply came quite early, and the market is just not mature enough for it, and more time is needed to develop it. At the same time, I think that the car is an important element for many in terms of ownership, as a kind of personal property.
Nevertheless, in the next 8–10 years, Uberization and autonomous cars will supplant the use of personal cars. I think that will be the main driver of the market.
