Mr. Michael Blaney:

I will give more background on the telematics product and the app and what it does. It was an initiative we came up with about five or six years ago to address the ridiculously high cost of young driver insurance. It was initially for customers who were commercial business owners who were trying to get their sons and daughters on the road for the first time to facilitate travel. It was very difficult to attract insurers into that marketplace. We developed some technology, which Dr. McDonnell may have heard referred to as black box technology, which puts a box into a car and measures how they drive. We took it a stage further. We found that black box technology was prohibitively expensive to install so we designed a phone app to do exactly the same thing so it was much more cost-effective. For the first time, an insurer could see how a driver performed when he or she got behind the wheel, particularly a young or inexperienced driver. It scored them on a number of areas such as braking, anticipating and appropriate use of speed. It gave them an insight very quickly into who the more reckless drivers were. The most positive part of it was that the good drivers, who represent the vast majority and are not reckless in how they approach driving on the road, were able to get up to 50% discount off the rates we had previously been able to offer in the marketplace.

It was an initiative which has been welcomed by insurers because they are able to enter that sector which is quite attractive to them considering the size of the premiums. They are also able to manage it from a profitability perspective which was always the challenge previously. Most insurers decided to stay away from it completely for that reason. We built a data hub and we managed to share the data between insurers and our clients and it has been growing. This year, that particular part of our business grew by 124%. It has been a huge growth area. There is a big market opportunity in the Republic of Ireland market to develop further. Anything that would block the movement of trade and stop us being able to establish a presence here to offer that into the market would be a retrograde step.

Such trade is firmly on our roadmap for development for next year but we must question the impact Brexit might have on our ability to trade into the Republic of Ireland as our UK Financial Conduct Authority regulation allows us to passport into any other EU state. That currently allows us to trade, without any barrier or difficulty, into the Republic of Ireland. There has been much talk about this arrangement and the passporting being under threat.