Prior to Parks Associates’ 13th-annual CONNECTIONS Europe: Strategies for the Smart Home and Consumer Iot conference, Michiel Fokke, CTO, Quby shared insights with the analyst team to discuss revenue opportunities and channels driving smart home products in Europe.

Michiel will be participating on the Integrating Energy Services with the Smart Home panel on Wednesday, November 14 at 13:00. Panelists joining him on this session include:

David Boundy, GM, Energy Solutions, Intel
Marco Dorjee, VP Business Development & Strategy IoT, DSR Corporation
Pierre Guillet, Solution Sales Manager, tado GmbH

What are the largest recurring revenue opportunities for the smart home industry in Europe?
First and foremost; with the energy transition in full-swing we as Quby experience first-hand how the energy industry is ready to move from a commodity-oriented business model to a service-oriented, recurring business model. Smart home solutions can play an instrumental role in this transition as the complexity of technology in homes is increasing. However, business models are still uncertain, due to the conservatism and fragmentation in the market.
Other than the energy industry, we see that insurance companies are now ready to be disrupted too. Smart home security systems could play a big role in prevention-as-a-service. Willingness to pay for these solutions is present, but as competition (Google, Amazon) is fierce in this area, it may be hard to become a winner.?

What are the biggest challenges rolling out new smart home products and services in Europe?
In the European smart energy market, the large array of incompatible solutions is making it very difficult to develop and launch smart home products with sufficient technical market reach. Also, delays upon delays in the smart meter roll-out planned for the UK, Germany and Belgium obstruct the profitability of developing energy insight services based on smart meter data.
Besides technical difficulties, consumers are still reluctant to spend money on recurring service fees. Service companies and utilities who are mid-transformation to service companies struggle to convince consumers of the value of their offerings.

What channels to market are driving growth in the smart home industry?
For one, the strong push of the global tech companies for their smart home assistants is opening up new opportunities for smart home manufacturers to increase their market adoption, by enabling attractive use cases for consumers, using voice assistance and conversational interfaces.
Second, utilities and insurers are increasingly impacted by the transparency that digital channels offer. For instance, comparing and switching energy supplier now takes only three mouse clicks. To improve customer engagement, loyalty and the relevancy of their propositions, they could leverage the additional communication channels and interaction points that smart home devices provide. Not to mention the value that can be generated using the data collected by these smart home devices.